By Dhirendra Tripathi

– Moderna stock (NASDAQ:MRNA) surged 8% in Monday’s premarket trading after the company said trials have shown that its booster raises antibodies against Omicron by at least 37 times.

The company tested its booster candidates at 50 µg and 100 µg dose, with the latter showing about 83-fold jump in neutralizing antibody levels compared to pre-boost. Moderna had previously admitted that the usual 2-dose regime of its vaccine was much less effective against the Omicron variant than against the then-prevalent Delta variant.

Booster candidates are being evaluated in ongoing phase 2/3 studies of approximately 300-600 participants per arm, Moderna said in a release.

According to Moderna, while its first line of defense against Omicron will be a booster of its mRNA-1273 vaccine, it will also continue to develop an Omicron-specific variant vaccine that it expects to advance into clinical trials early next year. It will also evaluate including omicron in its multivalent booster program, it said.

Omicron, now prevalent in more than 80 countries, is now dominating the Delta variant in many of those. Spreading much more rapidly than Delta, Omicron has hastened the return of lockdowns and other restrictions to European countries.  

In U.K. alone, more than 90,000 new cases have been reported each of the last two days.  While there are signs that Omicron is far less likely than Delta to cause serious infection - hospital admissions in the U.K. have not risen in parallel with case numbers - health experts are concerned that its greater infectiousness could still lead to public health systems being overwhelmed, while businesses fear that it will lead to acute staff shortages as the infected are forced to self-isolate.