A missed opportunity saw China lag behind in coveted vaccines

Photographer: Alex Kraus / Bloomberg

The call came early in the Covid-19 pandemic. Drew Weissman, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert in messenger RNA, received a consultation from a Chinese company interested in using the new technology to make a coronavirus vaccine.

MRNA, which effectively turns the body’s cells into small vaccine factories, has since become the star of the Covid era, supporting the prey made by Moderna Inc. and the Association Pfizer Inc./BioNTech SE, which have been among the most effective in the fight against the disease. Before Covid arrived, however, experimental science had not yet received regulatory approval to use it against any disease, let alone against the mysterious respiratory infection.

“They wanted to develop my technology in their company in China,” said Weissman, a leader in the field because of his work with the research partner. Katalin Karikó in discovering the potential to fight mRNA disease. “I told them I was interested.”

Then nothing happened.

“I never heard from them,” Weissman said.

It was a missed opportunity that thwarted the country’s push against the Covid vaccine and left Chinese companies recovering a technological system to revolutionize everything from flu vaccines to cancer drugs.

When the coronavirus spread worldwide last year, New York-based Pfizer ran to partner with the German BioNTech, mRNA leader who had hired Kariko as senior vice president. Meanwhile, Massachusetts-based Moderna had $ 2.5 billion in US government funding.

Retreat from China

By contrast, several Chinese companies focused on older technologies it turned out to be much less powerful. At a conference on April 10, the head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, George Fu Gao, said Chinese vaccines “do not have very high protection rates,” local media reported.

While the comments caused a great stir on social media, Gao he backtracked, and told the Global Times that he supported the Communist Party that it only referred to ways to improve vaccine efficiency. But no damage control can hide the fact that no China-made mRNA vaccine has yet been approved.

For more information, read: Are China’s coveted traits less effective? Experts increase Sinovac

This is a setback for President Xi Jinping’s ambition to make the country a country health care power of innovation. The effectiveness of mRNA with Covid vaccines opens a new frontier for technology, with researchers looking for ways to use it to fight cancer, tuberculosis and many other diseases, according to Surbhi Gupta, a health care and life sciences analyst with consulting firm Frost & Sullivan.

“MRNA technology has the potential to change the game,” he said.

For decades, vaccines have been made using inactive versions of viruses, but mRNA traits use genetic material to instruct the body to create the ear protein that the coronavirus uses to enter cells. In turn, this trains the body to fight possible infections.

Old-school Chinese-made Covid vaccines are already in use Sinovac Biotech Ltd. and China National Biotec Group Co. they rely on inactivated virus particles and have much lower protection rates than the effectiveness of more than 90% of mRNA vaccines in preventing infections.

The Sinovac vaccine has an efficacy rate of just over 50% in protection against symptomatic Covid-19, according to studies in Brazil, which only meet the minimum threshold required by global drug regulators. China National Biotec, state – owned, a unit of Sinopharm Group Co., has said its two inactivated vaccines are 73% and 79% effective in preventing symptomatic Covid, but has not released data to support this claim.

Meanwhile, that of China CanSino Biologics Inc. has produced a vaccine against the viral virus that, like those made by AstraZeneca Plc and Johnson & Johnson, uses a genetically modified virus to fight infection. The Tianjin-based company has reported 66% effectiveness in preventing symptomatic Covid-19 in its final stage.

A new generation of vaccines arrives, some without needles

The Chinese government has aggressively pushed to close the gap with the West and become an alternative pharmaceutical and biotechnological energy. It allowed controversial treatments with stem cells and gene therapy, despite concerns elsewhere about safety and efficacy. However, China did not make mRNA vaccines a priority.

“Before Covid, a lot of people still had reservations” about the technology, said Lusong Luo, senior vice president of BeiGene Ltd., a Beijing-based pioneer of biotechnology and a leading producer of cancer drugs. “It’s new, it’s at the forefront.”

Now, with the success of Pfizer and Moderna, Chinese companies are jumping into the fight, but their efforts will take time to bear fruit. China may not have mRNA vaccines until in late 2021, according to Feng Duojia, president of the China Vaccine Association, the China Global Television Network reported on April 11th.

For more information, read: China’s bid to increase vaccinations hampered by supply shortages

BeiGene announced in January one agreement to cooperate with Strand Therapeutics Inc. of Cambridge, Massachusetts in a mRNA treatment for tumors. “Now people realize that mRNA vaccines really work, it will be a lot easier,” Luo said.

From China Walvax Biotechnology Co. construction began in December on a facility to make mRNA vaccines, while CanSino signed an agreement in May last year with Vancouver-based Precision NanoSystems Inc. to develop a vaccine against mRNA. Contract manufacturer WuXi Biologics Cayman Inc. has said it is allocating more than $ 100 million to mRNA-related vaccines, discovery, development and manufacturing of biological products.

Although China has largely contained the spread of coronavirus on its borders, more effective vaccination and wider adoption among its population would allow the country to reopen sooner, reducing the need for quarantines and closures. China risks losing the advantage achieved by eliminating the virus if its inoculation unit is less effective than places where mRNA traits are the backbone of releases.

In Israel, where nearly 60% of the population has received the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine, is adding to Covid cases, hospitalizations and deaths. As there will be more adults in the United States, which also depends heavily on mRNA vaccines, President Joe Biden has predicted that Americans will be celebrating July 4 with barbecues in the garden once again.

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China is not the only country that lost the ship with mRNA. Although companies in Japan, India and Australia are major players in the fight against diseases such as the flu and polio, now no company in the Asia-Pacific region is firing mRNAs. “Basically, the mRNA was put in the“ too hard ”basket for many years,” he said Nigel McMillan, director of the Infectious Diseases and Immunology Program at Griffith University in Southport, Australia.

In March of this year, Takeda Pharmaceutical Co., Moderna’s local partner for the Japanese trials of its Covid vaccine, signed an agreement with New Jersey-based Anima Biotech on mRNA treatments for Huntington’s and other neurological diseases. Another major Japanese drug manufacturer, Daiichi Sankyo Co., announced on March 22 the start of an early-stage trial of its own Covid mRNA vaccine.