Patent-free Corbevax promises vaccine equity
(SciDev.Net) -Corbevax, a new vaccine against COVID-19, may have better success as a candidate for vaccine equity because it carries no patents, relies on long-established recombinant technology for manufacture and has the support of the US and Indian governments, its makers and health experts say.
The vaccine already has emergency use approval in India and the Hyderabad-based collaborator, Biological E Limited, is set to produce 100 million doses a month, starting February, according to a company spokesperson.
India’s Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC) helped see Corbevax through the pre-clinical stage and the Phase III clinical studies and is expected to advocate early clearances from the WHO.
Mahima Datla, managing director of Biological E, says once WHO clearances come through, Biological E is confident that it can scale up manufacturing to deliver 300 million doses as promised to the Indian government and an additional one billion doses globally.
Corbevax’s development owed mainly to a longstanding partnership to produce various vaccines between Biological E, the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, and the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas.
“Over the years, we worked together to produce vaccines that were of good quality and accessible around the world,” says Datla. “Given this background, we could readily develop Corbevax as an effective and affordable vaccine against COVID-19.”
Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India, tells SciDev.Net that “Corbevax is easy to manufacture and distribute because the recombinant technology used has been employed for decades to produce, for example, the Hepatitis-B vaccine”.
Unlike mRNA and several other vaccines which require extremely low cold chains, Corbevax can be stored and transported at 2—8 degree Celsius, allowing countries with limited resources to store and distribute it, Reddy said. It could prove ideal for booster doses for which trials are now being conducted in India, he added.
Biological E affirmed that the vaccine was found to be safe, well-tolerated and immunogenic [capable of building immunity] following the completion of phase III clinical trials involving more than 3,000 subjects between the ages of 18 and 80 at 33 sites across India.
Phase III studies showed Corbevax stimulating a better immune response than Covishield, a vaccine developed by Astra-Zeneca and the Oxford University, which is being manufactured in India and is the mainstay of the country’s COVID-19 immunisation programme. It also had fewer adverse reactions.
Reddy expects Corbevax to be cheaper than most existing vaccines mainly because of the intellectual property rights waiver announced by its main co-creator, Peter Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and professor at the Baylor College of Medicine.
Hotez said in a tweet on 28 December: “We technology transferred our vaccine and helped in its codevelopment with Biological E with no patent and no strings attached. As a result, it should be the least expensive COVID vaccine available yet.”
“This vaccine can be made locally all over the world, and we’ve now technology transferred our Texas Children’s vaccine to producers in India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Botswana. Our Texas Children’s Center does not plan to make money on this, it’s a gift to the world,” Hotez also tweeted.