Novavax has begun phase one of its clinical trail for a coronavirus vaccine candidate. Yahoo Finance’s Anjalee Khemlani breaks down the latest developments.

Video Transcript

ADAM SHAPIRO: To help us understand what's going on with coronavirus and this news from Novavax, Anjalee Khemlani joins us with the latest. Anjalee.

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: Thanks, Adam. So as you mentioned, Novavax entering into that phase-one trial in Australia with those participants and hoping to get into phase two by July and anticipating possibly having the results to prove efficacy to get emergency use by August, or at least some sort of deployment is what the president of already told us earlier today.

And so that also is in addition to ramping up production to 100 million doses by the end of the year and a billion by next year, which is pretty much on par of what we've heard. Novavax has received the largest amount of funding from CEPI, which is a European nonprofit backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to help produce this and to help ramp it up. And this is, you know, just another sort of milestone for biotech, which is really the sector that's getting a lot of prominence through this vaccine race.

Meanwhile, Merck, as you mentioned also, number one, buying outright a vaccine producer as well as announcing plans to partner with another nonprofit to develop vaccines for the coronavirus. And that sort of rounds out the news of a larger pharmaceuticals that we saw and especially the top players in the vaccine race, including Johnson & Johnson, Sanofi, GlaxoSmithKline, and others-- and Pfizer who are in the race now. And so this sort of makes sure that the top five are now in the race.

So positive news there. Definitely waiting to see, you know, how this all gets along. The two vaccine productions today-- so from Novavax and Merck-- are a specific type of technology, a newer technology as well that we'll wait to see what it proves in terms of efficacy. Adam.