As the World Trade Organization (WTO) debate intensified this week over a demand to waive patent protections for COVID-19 vaccines and therapies, the group’s new director-general, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, urged members to “walk and chew gum” at the same time by working with “companies to open up and license more viable manufacturing sites now in emerging markets and developing countries. We must get them to work with us on know-how and technology transfer now.”
LONDON – A further U.K. real-world study of COVID-19 vaccines has found a single dose dramatically reduces the chances of the most elderly and frail being admitted to the hospital as a result of serious infection.
Months of talks between Johnson & Johnson (J&J) and Merck & Co. Inc. about a COVID-19 vaccine manufacturing partnership came to fruition March 2 with the Biden administration hailing the deal as an “unprecedented historic” agreement between two long-time rivals.
LONDON – The SARS-CoV-2 variant of concern that caused a wave of infection in Manaus, Brazil, in December and January has been found to be both more transmissible and to evade immunity conferred by prior natural infection with the virus.
With several more emergency use authorizations (EUAs) across the globe, COVID-19 efforts to flatten the emerging variants with cocktail therapies and tweaked vaccines are frantically underway. BioWorld has tracked 884 therapeutics and vaccines that have entered development for the deadly SARS-CoV-2 virus since it first emerged more than a year ago, and the U.S. government has now provided EUAs to three vaccines and six therapies.
With the FDA’s granting of emergency use authorization (EUA) to Johnson & Johnson (J&J), there is now a third vaccine – and the first requiring only a single shot – against COVID-19 for adult Americans. Though it packs less of an efficacy punch, the EUA allows J&J’s Ad26.COV2.S to join mRNA vaccines from Moderna Inc. and Pfizer Inc./Biontech SE as protection against the virus.
China’s National Medical Products Administration granted conditional approval two Chinese-developed COVID-19 vaccines in less than 24 hours on Feb. 25. One of the vaccines approved was developed by Tianjin-based Cansino Biologics Inc., and the other by China National Pharmaceutical Group (Sinopharm) through its Wuhan Institute of Biological Products subsidiary.
As expected, the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) looked favorably upon the latest COVID-19 entry: Ad26.COV2.S, a one-shot product that emerged from the same Johnson & Johnson (J&J) platform, AdVac, that let the firm devise an Ebola vaccine cleared in Europe last year.
The EMA issued a guidance Feb. 25 outlining the requirements for manufacturers planning to modify COVID-19 vaccines to address emerging variants of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.
Eight months after Beijing-based Yisheng Biopharma Co. Ltd. unveiled its recombinant protein vaccine candidate for COVID-19, YS-SC2-010, the company raised $130 million in a series B round to pave way for the vaccine to enter clinical trials in the second quarter of this year, the company’s CEO David Shao told BioWorld.
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