Rival drugs giants in deal to make virus vaccine on huge scale

One of Britain’s biggest drug companies is teaming up with a French rival to develop a coronavirus vaccine and manufacture hundreds of millions of doses.

GlaxoSmithKline is to work with Sanofi on a treatment that they hope to test on humans during the second half of this year. They want to make a vaccine available a year later if the project succeeds and regulators grant approval.

Emma Walmsley, chief executive of GSK, the biggest vaccine maker, said the tie-up was unprecedented. She added: ‘‘We’re committed to making any vaccine that’s developed through the collaboration affordable to the public.’’

GSK is listed in the FTSE 100 share index of Britain’s biggest companies and generated sales of almost £33.8 billion (NZ$70b) last year, £7.2 billion of which came from its vaccines division. It is one of four companies that dominate the vaccines industry, the others being Sanofi, which is based in Paris, and the American rivals Pfizer and Merck.

The tie-up is significant because it raises the prospect that a Covid-19 treatment could be manufactured quickly on the large scale required to tackle the pandemic. It normally takes at least a decade to develop a vaccine from scratch but drug companies and research institutes are scrambling to find one much more quickly.

Sanofi will bring to the partnership a Covid-19 antigen – a molecule that helps the body to produce antibodies – that it is developing. GSK will contribute its adjuvant technology, which boosts an antigen’s potency. This makes smaller doses more effective and may mean that more of the vaccine can be manufactured.