File photo: Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan addresses the Swiss drugmaker's annual news conference in Basel, Switzerland, January 30, 2019 ReutersNarasimhan said producing enough vaccine for the world would also be a challengeAny vaccine to fight the new coronavirus will not be ready for use for at least two years, the chief executive of Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis, which no longer makes vaccines itself, told a German newspaper. Novartis sold its vaccine business in 2015 to GlaxoSmithKline, one of many companies around the world now racing to make a drug. “The results of the first clinical studies on the vaccine candidates should be available in autumn,” Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan told Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). Narasimhan, who headed development at Novartis’s vaccine business before the Basel-based company concluded it was too small to keep and should be unloaded, said producing enough vaccine for the world would also be a challenge. “That’s way too long,” he told FAZ.

Source: Dhaka Tribune May 15, 2020 08:03 UTC