“The important element here is that in general, neutralization correlates with total binding antibodies once you’re above a certain threshold. So the relevance of these results, for us, is not just the direct confirmation that in these first eight subjects, indeed, we see neutralizing activity. But they really allow us to extrapolate what we expect to be achieving in all 45 subjects,” said Tal Zaks, MD, PhD, Moderna’s chief medical officer, during a conference call . He added that preclinical animal trials showed that the vaccine prevented SARS-CoV-2 viral replication in animals’ lungs . “These data today take off the table the risk of not being immunogenic, or the risk of the antibody type being wrong — no, it works, and you see the demonstration of neutralizing activity,” Dr. Zaks said.