Islamabad: Pakistan’s Searle Company has entered into an agreement with a Chinese firm to manufacture the coronavirus vaccine in Pakistan. This is the first contract Pakistan has signed with a pharmaceutical company to begin the domestic production of COVID-19 vaccine.
“The Searle Company has concluded an exclusive licensing and supply agreement with Livzon Mapharm Inc. for the recombinant novel coronavirus vaccine (V-01)” reads the firm’s April 1 letter to the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX). The contract also covers the manufacturing transition of the V-01 vaccine in Pakistan.
The vaccine developed by China’s Livzon Pharmaceutical Group had shown promising results in phase I and II clinical trials. The phase III trial would enroll 20,000 people in multiple countries to evaluate the efficacy, safety, and immunogenicity of the vaccine, the company said.
Among the many COVID-19 vaccine projects around the world, “V-01 has many potential advantages such as strong safety profile, high neutralising antibody titres, long durability and easy to scale up manufacturing” the document said. The protein-based vaccine V-01 could be transported and stored at normal refrigerator temperatures at 2-8 degrees Celsius.
Urgent basis
Pakistani private pharmaceutical company hoped that government officials and relevant authorities would “take up the matter on urgent basis and support for fast-track approval to carry out phase III clinical trials in Pakistan” to pave the way for local vaccine manufacturing. Searle has two state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities in Lahore and Karachi.
Experts have urged the government to initiate local production of the vaccines to speed up the vaccination process in the country of 220 million people. Health professionals believe the pandemic has opened the way for health transformation in Pakistan and offers the country the opportunity to advance its medical research and develop domestic biomanufacturing capacity to make the country self-sufficient and better prepared for the future.
Pakistan earlier announced that it would import China’s CanSino COVID-19 vaccine in bulk to package three million doses locally at the National Institute of Health (NIH) in Islamabad.
Pakistn has so far approved four vaccines for use in the country – China’s Sinopharm and Cansino, Russia’s Sputnik V and Oxford University’s AstraZeneca.
