|
 UK Business Secretary Alok Sharma welcomed the tie-up as a vital
step to making the Oxford vaccine available as soon as possible if
it succeeds in clinical trials.
A team of British scientists last week dosed the first volunteers,
and earlier this month said large-scale production capacity was
being put in place to make millions of doses even before trials show
whether it is effective.
Only a handful of the vaccines in development have advanced to human
trials, an indicator of safety and efficacy - and the stage where
most vaccines fail.
"Our hope is that, by joining forces, we can accelerate the
globalisation of a vaccine to combat the virus and protect people
from the deadliest pandemic in a generation," AstraZeneca Chief
Executive Pascal Soriot said.
The drugmaker did not give details on when it plans to start
producing the vaccine "ChAdOx1 nCoV-19", being developed by the
Jenner Institute and Oxford Vaccine Group.
Though the firm is not a major player in vaccine development unlike
European peers GSK and Sanofi, who are working on their own vaccine,
it has deep pockets and a $6-billion-strong R&D budget.
The AstraZeneca-Oxford partnership is looking to produce 100 million
doses by the end of the year and prioritise supply in the UK, Soriot
told https://www.ft.com/content/ddf8ec8c-dc30-43b3-847e-c412704a0296
the Financial Times.
Cambridge-based AstraZeneca is also testing two of its approved
treatments as a therapy to help in the outbreak that has so far
infected over 3 million people and killed more than 215,000.
Its shares rose 2% on London's FTSE 100 by 0923 GMT as the main
index fell, outpacing rival GSK.
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Governments, drugmakers and researchers are working on around 100 vaccines for
the virus. Industry experts say a successful vaccine will likely take more than
a year to be developed but that is much faster than the average development time
of 5-7 years.There are currently no treatments or vaccines approved for the
highly-contagious respiratory illness caused by the coronavirus, but healthcare
workers have been trying many approaches to treat patients.
India's Serum Institute, the world's largest maker of vaccines by volume, has
already said https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-india-vaccine/indias-serum-institute-to-make-millions-of-potential-coronavirus-vaccine-doses-idUSKCN22A2YY
it would produce millions of doses of the Oxford University shot.
The vaccine, a type known as a recombinant viral vector vaccine, uses a weakened
version of the common-cold virus spiked with proteins from the novel coronavirus
to generate a response from the body's immune system.
Other drugmakers testing possible COVID-19 vaccines include Pfizer, Moderna,
Johnson & Johnson and Novavax.
(Reporting by Pushkala Aripaka in Bengaluru; Editing by Aditya Soni and Elaine
Hardcastle)
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