Despite the world’s major global vaccine companies refusing to share their technology, a South African vaccine manufacturer Afrigen developed its own version of mRNA COVID-19 vaccine. Afrigen used the publicly available sequence of Moderna Inc’s mRNA COVID-19 vaccine and aims to test it on humans by the end of 2022.
Afrigen’s vaccine candidate could be the first jab which was made based on a widely-used vaccine but without the help of the original manufacturer. It is also the first mRNA vaccine designed, developed and produced at lab scale in Africa as a whole. Afrigen is a part of a consortium brought together by the World Health Organisation (WHO) after Pfizer, Moderna and other vaccine manufacturers declined to share their expertise.
The aim of the consortium was to reduce vaccine inequity and make sure that poorer nations have a shot at fighting Covid with vaccines being manufactured in their own backyard. The WHO hopes that this consortium will be to address the shortage of vaccines in several impoverished nations in the continent.
Afrigen will share its technology with Biovac, a partly state-owned South African vaccine producer, according to a report by Reuters. It also has agreed to help train companies in Argentina and Brazil. The consortium last September decided to go at it alone after it failed to bring Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna Inc onboard. The major vaccine manufacturers pointed out complexity of the manufacturing process as a reason to not transfer the technology.
“At laboratory scale we have a vaccine that we now need to test but the human studies will only start around November 2022. We are the first to take the sequence developed by Stanford University and used by Moderna for their great vaccine, to design and develop a vaccine produced at laboratory scale,” Afrigen’s managing director Petro Terblanche was quoted as saying by news agency AFP.
“We completed the process from the design to a final formulation, but it’s small scale, but it’s a good start, it’s a fabulous start. This is the first yet very important step in empowering low- and middle-income countries to create a fully integrated vaccine production sector,” she further added.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus also lambasted rich nations for hoovering up large supplies of the world’s vaccines. “In Africa, over 85 percent of people are yet to receive a single dose of vaccine. We can’t end the acute phase of the pandemic unless we close this gap,” Tedros said during a briefing in January.
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