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The Oxford University-AstraZeneca vaccine is a collaboration between a pharmaceutical giant and an old institution with the goal of becoming as adept at monetizing its discoveries as it is at making them.
It’s a combination that could hasten the defeat of COVID-19 and it may, over time, bring the university and some of its leading researchers a stake of more than £ 74 million.
It also sheds light on the relationship between publicly funded academia and private finance, which increasingly drives scientific innovation, often to the benefit of patients and shareholders, as well as the concern of those who distrust the role of the private sector.
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The brains behind the vaccine are based at Oxford’s Jenner Institute, named after Edward Jenner, creator of the smallpox vaccine and part of the medical school.
Chief among these is vaccination professor Sarah Gilbert, whose ongoing research left her ideally positioned to tackle COVID-19 when it emerged as a global pandemic earlier this year.
His focus has been the development of vaccines that use a viral vector “platform technology”, essentially a vehicle that can be adapted to carry genetic material from a given disease necessary to trigger an immune response.
Fundamentally, it is adaptable and enables rapid vaccine development.
Their motivation is to save lives by providing a vaccine that can roll back coronavirus and normalize social and economic life around the world.
But it can also be very rewarding courtesy of a framework, powered by the University of Oxford, designed to maximize and monetize the benefits of academic innovation.
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At the insistence of Professor Gilbert, AstraZeneca has pledged that the vaccine will be made non-profit as long as COVID-19 is classified as a pandemic and will remain so when sold to developing countries.
Should the disease recede and the vaccine becomes an annual defense against COVID-19 sold at a profit, Professor Gilbert, her close colleagues, the university, and a variety of private and corporate investors, including Google’s parent company, Alphabet, they will benefit.
Prior to COVID, the rights to develop and manufacture the vaccine were owned by Vaccitech, a commercial spin-off company founded in 2015 by Professor Gilbert and her colleague Professor Adrian Hill, a geneticist and director of the Jenner Institute.
As part of the deal, the university retained a 50% share of the rights.
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Oxford encourages its researchers to form private companies in order to attract outside investment in their innovations and allow them to share the financial benefits, rather than having everyone go to the private sector.
Since 2016, it has been a partner in the world’s largest university venture capital vehicle, Oxford Science Innovation (OSI), which has raised over £ 600 million for investments in life sciences, artificial intelligence and deep technology.
OSI is one of Vaccitech’s major shareholders and its investors include GV (formerly Google Ventures), Wellcome Trust and Fosun, the Chinese healthcare conglomerate that owns the Premier League club Wolverhampton Wanderers.
Professor Gilbert and Professor Hill remain employees of the university and, until September, when Professor Gilbert left the Vaccitech board to focus on the vaccine, directors of the company. Between them, they still own around 10% of Vaccitech.
When it became clear that the coronavirus would require a global vaccination program spanning billions of doses, the university and Vaccitech agreed that they needed a larger partner to handle the commercial and manufacturing processes.
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After negotiations with several potential partners, recognized as tense by some of those involved, Vaccitech agreed to return their rights to the university, allowing Oxford to make an exclusive deal with AstraZeneca.
According to figures first reported by the Wall Street Journal, AstraZeneca paid the university an initial fee of $ 10 million (£ 7.4 million) and has promised another $ 80 million (£ 59.4 million) in “payments for milestones”.
AstraZeneca will only make a profit when COVID-19 is not a pandemic, a decision it says will be based on the opinions of a variety of independent bodies.
When that time comes, the university will receive royalties of 6% on AstraZeneca vaccine sales. Vaccitech is reported to receive 24% of those fees.
AstraZeneca estimates that it will spend $ 6 billion (£ 4.5 billion) to produce the three billion doses it has promised globally by the end of 2021. Of that, $ 1 billion (£ 740 million) is costs. ” non-industrial “, including licensing, testing and regulation, and pharmacovigilance, continuous monitoring of safety. Another $ 5 billion (£ 3.7 billion) covers manufacturing.
Governments are expected to be charged between $ 3 and $ 4 (£ 2.20- £ 2.97) for each dose, about a tenth of the price of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
Manufacturing and supply agreements have been negotiated by its commercial teams around the world, with partner institutions and companies in India, Russia, Latin America, the United States and Australia.
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Oxford University has received £ 65.5 million in funding from the Vaccine Task Force, leaving it open to criticism that public funds are driving private profits.
AstraZeneca notes that you will not initially make a profit. Another trade-off is that taxpayer funding eliminates the risk of private investment needed to accelerate development.
For example, the three stages of clinical trials for COVID-19 vaccines are being conducted in parallel rather than in series. And AstraZeneca, like Pfizer, has manufactured large numbers of “at risk” vaccines before receiving approval from regulators around the world.
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Vaccitech CEO Bill Enright declined to comment on contract negotiations or the finances of the vaccine development, but defended the notion of public-private partnerships.
“Institutions are really good at discovering development early, but most of them don’t have the expertise in product development and they don’t do what it takes to get a product to market through phase two and phase three testing. That is. it gets expensive and colleges don’t want to pay for that, “he told Sky News.
“So seeking funding from elsewhere, from venture capital groups who are willing to take on these kinds of risks and expenses, to get the right rewards, is a great way to drive innovation.
“Some would argue that because the government has provided funding, some of this might not be appropriate, but that the funding allows the companies involved to take appropriate risks.”
Vaccitech may now be a bystander as the first iteration of the COVID-19 vaccine unfolds, but it could play a central role again in the future. It retains the exclusive rights to the next phase of viral vector technology that could power the second generation of COVID-19 vaccines, and has received £ 2.3 million of public funding to develop it.
