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TOKYO: Pharmaceutical companies must be “very transparent” about the risks and benefits of vaccines in their efforts to end COVID-19, the head of Asia’s largest pharmaceutical company told AFP.
Takeda, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, is not developing its own vaccine, but has contracts with various companies to distribute its injections in Japan and is also testing a treatment against the virus.
“We have to handle the situation well, be very transparent and extremely educational in the way we present the products,” Chief Executive Christophe Weber told AFP in an interview.
“Medications or vaccines are never perfect … there are always some side effects,” said Weber, who joined Takeda in 2014 and assumed the top job a year later, after nearly two decades at Britain’s GlaxoSmithKline.
But he is optimistic that the industry can adequately explain the risks and benefits.
The Frenchman even sees a possibility that inoculation could help roll back the growing wave of uncertainty and outright opposition to vaccination around the world.
“It will be interesting to see. Vaccine vacillation is strong, especially in some countries, but many vaccines protect against diseases that people never see,” he said.
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“It’s different here, everyone is seeing the impact of the coronavirus … so it could once again prove the value of vaccines.”
Takeda signed an agreement with the Japanese government and American firm Moderna Therapeutics in October to import and distribute 50 million doses of its vaccine in Japan starting in the early part of 2021.
The US Food and Drug Administration on Friday granted an emergency clearance for Moderna’s jab, the same permission that has already been granted to the Pfizer / BioNTech version.
Takeda also signed an agreement with US biotech firm Novavax to produce and distribute its vaccine in Japan, if ongoing clinical trials are successful.
But the company, which became one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies after the purchase of Shire in Ireland in 2019, has decided not to develop its own coronavirus vaccine.
“When we evaluated the situation and the technology that we have internally, we felt that we did not have the best technology to develop a vaccine,” Weber said.
TREATMENT FOR COVID-19
Japan’s pharmaceutical sector has moved comparatively slow in the race to end the pandemic, and while companies like AnGes, Shionogi and Daiichi Sankyo are now developing vaccines, they are not expected to be available before 2022 at the earliest.
However, the country has gotten fixes from gamers abroad, including Pfizer and AstraZeneca.
“There is no leading vaccine player in Japan,” Weber said, adding that Takeda hopes to develop in that direction, including with plans for a dengue vaccine.
READ: Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Sinovac: A look at three key COVID-19 vaccines
He believes that Japan’s biotech sector is less developed than that of the United States because the country lacks the “vibrant spin-off mechanism” to help scientific research groups become successful startups.
“In Japan, scientific research and academia are strong, but there is much less in terms of spin-offs and venture capital,” he said.
“We need to do more to build this ecosystem in Japan,” he added, pointing to an open innovation research facility that Takeda founded in 2018 and is home to 70 companies, including young biotech companies.
And while it has moved away from coronavirus vaccines, Takeda has been working on plasma therapy to treat the new respiratory disease in collaboration with an international alliance of drug manufacturers.
Called CoVIg-19, the treatment uses concentrated, purified antibodies extracted from patients who have battled the coronavirus.
Weber expects the results of clinical trials for the treatment to be released early next year and says the time frame for it to hit the market “will depend on the data.”
READ: How Moderna’s COVID-19 Vaccine Will Be Implemented in the US
He is not concerned that the arrival of multiple vaccines will make treatment irrelevant, warning that “we must not drop the ball and assume that vaccines will solve everything.”
“Vaccines are not 100 percent effective,” he said, adding that it is not clear how long they protect and that some patients suffer from conditions that prevent them from being inoculated.
Vaccinating the entire world will also be a long process, Weber emphasized.
“There is still a great need for effective treatments.”
