WHO: Drugmaker Sinergium to share bird flu vaccine data globally for equitable rollout during pandemic
GENEVA, July 29 — Bird flu vaccine developer Sinergium Biotech will share its data with manufacturers in low and middle-income countries to help to accelerate a fair rollout if a pandemic occurs, the World Health Organisation said on Monday.
The Argentine private sector biopharmaceutical company is at an early stage of developing mRNA vaccines against the H5N1 virus and has pledged to share its findings with a network of partner manufacturers set up by the WHO during the peak of Covid-19 to help poorer countries to gain access to life-saving medical tools.
Until now, the WHO has assisted partners but this is the first time one of them with a vaccine in development has volunteered to share it with others.
“Partners interested in this will be able to start getting their fingers wet, beginning to practise with an H5N1 candidate so that if a pandemic was to start ... they would already have the necessary tools in their facilities,” said Dr Martin Friede, head of the WHO vaccine research unit.
The WHO’s mRNA technology transfer hub programme includes manufacturers in 15 countries, though not all are fully established. Among those involved in the programme are Biovac in South Africa and Institut Pasteur in Senegal.
The South African centre was set up after global pharmaceuticals companies including Moderna and Pfizer declined to provide the technical know-how to replicate their Covid vaccines, mainly owing to intellectual property concerns.
The outbreak of H5N1 in dairy cows and some farm workers in the United States prompted Washington to award US$176 million (RM815 million) to Moderna to advance development of its bird flu vaccine.
While the WHO has said the risk to the public from the avian influenza virus remains low and that it is not spreading between people, they say it has the potential to cause a future pandemic because of its widespread circulation in animals.
While Friede acknowledges that the likes of Moderna and Pfizer would be able to produce vaccines much more quickly than manufacturers in the WHO programme, he said that the scheme would allow Sinergium’s partners to begin production reasonably quickly and help to keep poorer countries from being reliant on handouts.
There are vaccines available for the H5N1 strain that is spreading among cows in the United States, but they are mostly made using chicken eggs, which means they would take months to produce at scale if needed.
Sinergium’s mRNA flu vaccine has yet to be tested in people, the WHO said, so it would require human trials before use.
Moderna’s mRNA H5N1 flu vaccine is further advanced, with late-stage trials in humans expected to take place next year.
— Reuters
New push for mRNA bird flu vaccine development: WHO
The World Health Organization announced Monday a new project to accelerate the development in poorer countries of vaccines for human bird flu infections using cutting-edge messenger RNA technology.
The WHO said Argentinian manufacturer Sinergium Biotech would lead the effort and had already begun developing candidate H5N1 vaccines.
The bird flu H5N1 first emerged in 1996, but since 2020 an exponential growth in outbreaks in birds has occurred in parallel with the virus increasingly jumping to mammals, including cattle in US farms and a few humans.
This has prompted fears the virus could spark a future pandemic.
Sinergium is aiming to establish proof-of-concept in preclinical models for its candidate vaccines, the WHO said.
Once the preclinical data is ready, the technology, materials, and expertise will be shared with a network of manufacturers in poorer countries, allowing them to accelerate their own development and production.
The UN health agency said the project would be rolled out through the mRNA technology transfer program it established with the UN-backed Medicines Patent Pool (MPP) in 2021, at the height of the COVID-19 crisis.
That program was aimed to help low- and middle-income countries, which found themselves dramatically underserved during the pandemic, to develop and produce their own vaccines using mRNA.
The technology instructs the body to produce a unique protein that stimulates an immune response, teaching it to defend against the infection.
Vaccine equity
Swiftly developed mRNA COVID vaccines were game-changers during the pandemic, but they also exposed glaring global vaccine inequity and demands for a fairer distribution amid efforts to use the technology against other diseases.
"This initiative exemplifies why WHO established the mRNA Technology Transfer Program," the agency's chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement.
That program, which counts 15 manufacturing partners in countries ranging from South Africa to Ukraine to Vietnam, was aimed "to foster greater research, development and production in low- and middle-income countries", he said.
That way, "when the next pandemic arrives, the world will be better prepared to mount a more effective and more equitable response".
Avian influenza viruses are among those considered to carry the potential of sparking a future pandemic.
The WHO has said there are a range of traditional influenza vaccines already licensed for pandemic use that could potentially be tailored to combat H5N1 if it begins spreading among people.
But Martin Friede, who heads the WHO's vaccine research unit, said focusing on developing mRNA-based vaccines was particularly interesting when seeking to establish sustainable production capacity.
Previous efforts to boost influenza vaccine production in developing countries had often faltered, with facilities narrowly focused on egg-based pandemic influenza jabs shutting after the threat dissipated and governments stopped procuring the doses.
"The advantage of mRNA is that, in theory, we can make a COVID vaccine, we can make H5N1 vaccines, but also many other vaccines and importantly also therapeutics," Friede told reporters.
If the need for H5N1 vaccines or other jabs fades, instead of shutting down production, "we hope that all of the partners will be able to produce something else", he said.
He said half of the manufacturers in the program had already begun installing necessary equipment to develop and produce mRNA-based vaccines, meaning they will be able to act far more swiftly if disaster strikes again.
© 2024 AFP
No comments:
Post a Comment