“With regard to vaccines, there will be big news in the next one to two weeks.” On December 4th, Wang Junzhi, deputy head of the expert group of vaccine R&D special class of scientific research group and academician of Chinese Academy of Engineering, gave a speech on “COVID-19 pneumonia vaccine and Progress in Drug R&D” at the 8th World Conference of Integrated Traditional Chinese and Western Medicine, saying that “600 million inactivated vaccines will be approved for marketing within this year”.
It is reported that as of December 2, there are 214 COVID-19 vaccines under research worldwide, of which 51 have entered clinical research and 14 are from China; 14 patients entered stage ⅲ clinical stage, and 6 patients came from China. However, there are 6 vaccines in Phase III clinical practice in China, and 4 vaccines are inactivated vaccines, which come from Beijing Institute of Biology, Wuhan Institute of Biology, Kexing Zhongwei and Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences. In addition, the recombinant protein vaccine from Zhifei Bio has recently entered Phase III clinical research.
What is the safety and effectiveness of the domestic vaccine? “This itself is the result of our country’s accumulated research and development capabilities, technology and experience in the vaccine field for many years, which reflects China’s relatively good technical advantages and institutional advantages in vaccine research and development.” Wang Junzhi said that inactivated vaccines are relatively mature in China, and the technology is relatively good. Moreover, the main characteristics of inactivated vaccine are closest to the structure of natural virus, so the immune response of human body is stronger and the safety is controllable after application. In addition, the inactivated vaccine is stable and can be transported at 2-8 degrees Celsius, so it is convenient to transport in cold chain.
“The whole R&D, production, quality control, safety and effectiveness evaluation standards of inactivated vaccines are relatively mature. We have rich experience and adopt advanced purification technology and quality control technology to make the purity of antigen reach over 95%, which is consistent with the standard of recombinant protein vaccine. ” Wang Junzhi said that after the inactivated vaccine was prepared, it had obtained good safety and immunogenicity results after multi-phase clinical trials.
In Wang Junzhi’s view, for COVID-19 vaccine, no matter what technical route is adopted, the most important thing is to develop a safe, effective and controllable vaccine by combining the characteristics of pathogens and adopting suitable technologies, which is the most important and the only criterion for judgment.
