Moderna vaccine antibodies last at least 6 months

A follow-up study of 33 people who received Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine in early trials show the antibodies it induced are still present six months after the second dose.

“Antibody activity remained high in all age groups,” researchers said.

They confirmed the findings using three different tests, according to a report on Tuesday in The New England Journal of Medicine. Earlier this month, Pfizer Inc and partner BioNTech said their vaccine using similar messenger RNA (mRNA) technology remained highly effective for at least six months.

The researchers conducting the Moderna vaccine study will continue to follow the same volunteers to see whether the antibodies last longer than six months.

They are also evaluating the potential for a booster dose to extend the duration of the antibodies and improve their potency against new more contagious variants of the coronavirus.

About the Moderna vaccine

The Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine is an mRNA vaccine against COVID-19 encoding for a prefusion stabilized form of the Spike (S) protein, which was co-developed by Moderna and investigators from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ (NIAID) Vaccine Research Center.

The first clinical batch, which was funded by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, was completed on February 7, 2020 and underwent analytical testing; it was shipped to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on February 24, 2020, 42 days from sequence selection