Comment: Who will get the COVID-19 vaccine being developed by Chinese companies?

LAUSANNE: For all its innovative prowess, China has generally lagged behind other countries in vaccine development.

But that seems to be changing with the race for a coronavirus vaccine, with Chinese companies potentially even at the forefront.

As is often the case with China, the question is: who are we dealing with? Who are the main vaccine developers?

How far are they in the development of a vaccine? What is your focus?

What is the connection to the Chinese state? And what is the outlook if China introduces the vaccine first?

Of the 32 vaccines in human trials around the world, a greater number are coming from Chinese companies than you might expect. The three main players are Sinovac, CanSino Biologics, and Sinopharm.

COMPANY CREDENTIALS

Sinovac is a NASDAQ-listed company based in Beijing, founded in 2001. It is what we call a specialized vaccine developer and, for example, it has developed vaccines for hepatitis A and B, seasonal influenza, swine influenza and influenza. avian influenza.

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It was the first company in the world to gain approval for a swine flu vaccine in 2009. It also remains the sole supplier of an avian flu vaccine. Sinovac’s coronavirus vaccine has entered phase three of clinical trials in Brazil and Indonesia, and the company has already prepared a plant for mass manufacturing of vaccines in Beijing.

CanSino, the weakest of the three, was founded in 2009 in Tianjin, northeast China, by a group of high-level professionals from various multinationals.

For example, Dr. Xuefeng Yu, a Canadian passport holder, was the global director of bacterial vaccine development at the French pharmaceutical company Sanofi Pasteur. The company was listed in Hong Kong in March 2019 and in Shanghai in August 2020.

In 2014, CanSino became the third pharmaceutical company to develop an Ebola vaccine. In July 2020, its coronavirus vaccine entered phase three of clinical trials, and in August its patent was formally approved in China. Clinical trials are being conducted in Saudi Arabia, Mexico and with soldiers from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

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Sinopharm is owned by the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council (SASAC) – the closest a company can get to being part of the central government and the only such pharmaceutical company in China.

Sinopharm has 150,000 employees and more than 1,500 subsidiaries, including six publicly listed companies. Vaccine development is carried out through two institutes of China National Biotec Group, a subsidiary of Sinopharm: the Beijing Biological Institute and the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products.

The latter was the first institute in the world to enter clinical trials for a COVID-19 vaccine in April. She became the first to enter stage three testing in June in the United Arab Emirates, and more recently in Peru, Morocco and Argentina.

It is also conducting tests with employees of the oil conglomerate PetroChina. Sinopharm President Liu Jingzhen recently predicted that the vaccine would be on the market in December 2020.

THE CHINESE APPROACH

Chinese vaccine developers have faced an unusual problem: Very few people are infected with coronavirus in their home country. This is one of the reasons they have been conducting clinical trials around the world, but especially in friendly countries.

Impatient with the results, China has also been circumventing its own regulatory process, which helps explain the trials of soldiers and oil workers.

Especially in the current climate, many people in the West would probably assume that these companies are all fronts of the Chinese state, but it is not that simple.

True, there is no medical company closer to the government than Sinopharm, but Sinovac was founded as a private company by leading vaccine scientist and businessman Weidong Yin.

The largest shareholder with 15 percent is SAIF Capital Partners, a major Hong Kong-based venture capital firm that spun off from Japan’s Softbank. The Chinese state has an indirect interest in Sinovac through Peking University, which owns an entity called SinoBioWay that has a 13 percent stake in the pharmaceutical company.

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The rest of the company is owned by a wide variety of small private shareholders and the founder, and the management team still owns more than 10 percent.

CanSino, meanwhile, has strong ties to the Institute of Biology at the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, an arm of the PLA, through a collaboration with Dr. Chen Wei, who was instrumental in developing the Ebola vaccine. from CanSino, and probably explains CanSino’s COVID-19. vaccine trial in soldiers.

However, in terms of company ownership, there is no link to the state. CanSino is owned primarily by the founding team and venture capital firms.

Interestingly, the name “CanSino” is related to the fact that the founders have lived in Canada for a long time. Canada is also the first country to order vaccines from CanSino, and the only European or North American country to have shown interest in a Chinese vaccine.

THE ORDER OF PRIORITY

If China produces the world’s first COVID-19 vaccine, what happens next? Presumably the Chinese people will be the top priority for vaccination. After that, the countries that are partners in the China Belt and Road economic initiative will likely be next in line, especially those that have helped with clinical trials.

Further down the line could be countries that have been least vocal in the geopolitical war between the United States and China, such as France, Germany and Switzerland. But who knows: China has also been generous, and political, in providing face masks and fans to critics.

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Finally, keep in mind that the Chinese do not solely control all of their efforts to produce a COVID-19 vaccine. Fosun Pharma is partnering with Germany’s Pfizer and BioNTech on another vaccine initiative – the only Chinese player in an international joint venture.

Fosun is also a shareholder in Oxford Science Innovation, which invests in VacciTech, the company that is collaborating on the hot-tipped AstraZeneca vaccine. More interestingly, Huawei and Tencent are also investors in VacciTech.

Clearly, it appears that the Chinese are hedging their bets.

Mark Greeven is Professor of Innovation and Strategy at IMD. This comment first appeared on The Conversation