Prices for lab animals shoot up

– Inside one of the Chinese labs racing to create a coronavirus vaccine, researchers work weekends, lab monkeys are in short supply and plans are being made for human trials abroad.

Yisheng Biopharma, a company based in the northeastern city of Shenyang, has been working nonstop since January to find the silver bullet against the disease that emerged in China late last year.

A resurgence of cases in Beijing – after China had largely brought the virus under control – has highlighted the urgency for the world to find a vaccine against the coronavirus.

Yisheng is better known for making rabies vaccines, but it has converted one of its nine workshops into a coronavirus inoculation production line and will recruit up to 50 extra workers.

The company is still in the early stages of development. But it will take the risk of starting production of its vaccine in September, before completing clinical trials, so the shots are ready sooner for the public if the product is approved.

“This vaccine must appear quickly and it is impossible to wait until the next epidemic season to complete the trial and the third epidemic season to use the vaccine,” Yisheng chairperson Zhang Yi said.

He said his researchers had not had any rest on weekends since they got the gene sequence of the coronavirus, on the second day of Chinese New Year in late January. “There is too much work to do,” said Zhang.

The company’s planned vaccine is at the animal testing stage, which precedes human clinical trials.

Zhang said tests on mice and rabbits had shown good results, giving the animals high levels of neutralising antibodies.

The vaccine is expected to not only protect the healthy against infection, but also heal patients with Covid-19, according to the company.

The next step will be to test it on monkeys, which have become expensive due to high demand from labs testing an array of Covid-19 antibody drugs and vaccines, according to Yisheng chief executive David Shao.

Yisheng used to pay between 10 000 and 20 000 yuan (R24 000 and R48 000) each for macaques, now each animal is worth 100 000 yuan, said Shao. – AFP