MILAN, Aug. 10 (Class Editori) -- AstraZeneca has signed an agreement with Shenzhen Kangtai Biological Products in order to produce hundreds of millions of doses of its experimental vaccine against COVID-19 to be used in China. In detail, the company from Shenzhen will produce at least 100 million doses by the end of the year, and at least 200 million within 2021.
The British pharmaceutical giant, which has committed itself to distributing more than 2 billion doses of its experimental vaccine worldwide, has already signed some agreements for the distribution of the product with the USA and Europe. Moreover, the company is collaborating with the Indian Serum Institute in order to ensure 1 billion doses of the vaccine to the countries with low and medium income. “The agreement with Kangtai is exclusive for the market of Mainland China”, the English giant has pointed out.
China is working to the development of different possible vaccines against COVID-19, even though this agreement with AstraZeneca is an evidence of the fact that Chinese leaders and scientists believe that the domestic market could benefit from more vaccine options.
In fact, it seems that the country is acting as other states, such as the USA, which, in the previous weeks, allocated 1.2 billion dollars in order to obtain 300 million doses of the investigational medicinal product of the pharmaceutical company.
The candidate AZD1222, developed in collaboration with the Oxford University, is currently one of the vaccines in the most advanced phase worldwide and is undergoing a phase III trial in the UK, Brazil and South Africa.
Among the other pharmaceutical companies which have started the last phase of the trial on the COVID-19 vaccine there are also Modernaand Pfizer and the ChineseSinovac Biotech and China National Biotec Group. AstraZeneca should be starting the phase III of the trial in the USA this month.
It has been impossible to understand how the two companies reached this agreement. AstraZeneca has declared it has been the sole multinational pharmaceutical company to have sent a representative to the business forum with the Chinese President Xi Jinping at the end of July.
Xi “hopes we will manage to win the challenges related to the pandemic and that we will do our best”, Wang Lei, Executive Vice-President of AstraZeneca has declared during an interview with the Chinese state-owned television after the forum.
In the meantime, Kangtai had already disclosed it is going to invest 1 billion yuan in the construction of a production factory for the COVID-19 vaccine, with a capacity of 100 million doses per year. This project should be completed by the end of August. (All rights reserved)
(Source:Class Editori)
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