A deal to secure early access to a promising new coronavirus vaccine has been announced by the UK Government enhancing the UK’s growing portfolio of vaccine candidates to protect the public and to save lives.
The agreement with GSK and Sanofi Pasteur, which combined have the largest vaccine manufacturing capability in the world, will supply the UK with 60 million doses of their Covid-19 vaccine, which is based on existing DNA-based technology used to produce Sanofi’s flu vaccine.
If the GSK and Sanofi vaccine candidate is proven effective in human studies, the UK could be able to vaccinate priority groups, such as frontline health and social care workers and those at increased health risk, as soon as summer 2021. Human clinical studies of the vaccine will begin in September followed by a Phase 3 study in December 2020.
With this announcement, the UK Government has now secured early access to four different types of immunisation and a total of 250 million doses, giving the UK the most likely chance of finding a safe and effective vaccine at the quickest speed.
This latest agreement comes as the UK Government confirmed that almost 72,000 people have volunteered to receive information about participating in future vaccine studies following the launch of the NHS Covid-19 vaccine research registry last week.
Earlier this month, the UK Government announced it had secured 90 million Covid-19 vaccine doses thanks to partnerships with the BioNTech / Pfizer alliance and Valneva. A deal has also been agreed to secure access to treatments containing Covid-19 neutralising antibodies from AstraZeneca, to protect those who cannot receive vaccines such as cancer and immunocompromised patients.
This is in addition to an existing global licensing agreement signed with AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford to research, develop and manufacture a Covid-19 vaccine for the UK public. AstraZeneca will work to produce 100 million doses for the UK in total.
Original source: DFID
Published on 29 July 2020
