First vaccine results offer muted hope Last week, Chinese biotechnology firm CanSino Biologics became the first to publish the peer-reviewed results from the phase 1 trial of its COVID-19 vaccine. In their phase 1 study, the vaccine elicited an immune response in 108 people. But the level of response was underwhelming. “It is not great, but it is better than nothing,” says vaccine researcher Hildegund Ertl. The results follow an announcement by US biotechnology company Moderna that claimed its vaccine has shown tentatively positive results. The vaccines are strikingly different: Moderna’s is a messenger-RNA vaccine based on unproven technology, whereas CanSino’s uses a genetically engineered adenovirus, with better-understood characteristics (and well-known drawbacks). The companies have taken very different approaches when announcing their results to an expectant world: Moderna has not shared its data and it made its results public in a press release. Chemical & Engineering News | 5 min read Go deeper into how the two vaccines work, and their hopeful but cautious reception, in Nature Biotechnology. (6 min read) Reference: The Lancet paper