From Oxford to an Italian lab, one race for coronavirus vaccine is gaining backers (msn.com)
POMEZIA, Italy —On a day in mid-March — as the pandemic began to grip the world — a box from Oxford University arrived at a lab south of Rome. In it, packed with dry ice, were several tiny vials. Each one held a few drops of “seed stock,” a starter kit for the production of a potential vaccine for the novel coronavirus.
The company’s job was to turn a few droplets into an amount large enough for 13,000 people — a sufficient quantity to perform large-scale trials unfolding on several continents.
“We could really feel the pressure,” said Francesco Calvaruso, the production manager of Advent, which needed two months to grow, filter and purify a trial vaccine known as AZD1222.
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