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 The agreement gives Tan Thanh, a drug distributor, the right to sell
Oravax’s oral vaccine in development throughout the Association of
Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which includes Brunei, Cambodia,
Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore,
Thailand and Vietnam, Oramed said.
"The parties have agreed to negotiate follow-on orders potentially
worth hundreds of millions of dollars," it said, adding the ASEAN
region has a prospective patient population of about 660 million.
Nadav Kidron, chief executive of Oramed, said its oral COVID vaccine
is undergoing Phase I clinical trials and results should be
available in early 2022. The vaccine has been shown to work in
animal tests, he said.
As a Communist country, Kidron said, Vietnam could decide on a short
Phase II trial and then give emergency authorisation. "Potentially,
marketing could be very, very fast," he told Reuters.
As long as Phase I results are as expected, Kidron believes more
countries will be interested since the new technology is not likely
to require as many boosters as current vaccines. "The idea is that
you take it and that's going to be your dosing and you're done," he
said.
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 Last week, Nikki Fried,
Florida's Agriculture Commissioner, said that
given the rapid spread of the Omicron variant,
she was pushing the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration to accelerate the review of oral
vaccines as an alternative to injections.
"Countries like the U.S. and Israel (which uses
the Pfizer vaccine) ... may end up being behind
because if developing countries step up their
game they may be having the newest technologies
available to them before the Western world,"
Kidron said.
(Reporting by Steven Scheer; editing by Barbara
Lewis)
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