Three key studies of COVID-19 vaccines to launch in summer

• The WSJ reports that the federal government (National Institutes of Health) plans to fund and conduct pivotal studies of three COVID-19 vaccine candidates starting this summer.
• The large-scale trials will test Moderna's (MRNA +3.8%) mRNA-1273 starting next month, Oxford University and AstraZeneca's (AZN +2.2%) AZD1222 in August and Johnson & Johnson's (JNJ +1.4%) Ad26.COV2-S in September. Each is projected to enroll ~30K people.
• Pfizer (PFE -0.4%), which is not participating in the NIH testing program, together with collaboration partner BioNTech SE (BNTX -0.8%), plans to launch a Phase 3 study on its candidate, BNT162, as early as next month (four variants of the vaccine are currently being tested).
• The feds may include additional large-scale studies of other vaccine candidates, such as those being developed by Sanofi (SNY +0.9%) and Merck (MRK -1.1%) according Dr. Larry Corey, a member of the committee advising NIH on the design of the trials.