It was the Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu, and not Al Pacino in The godfather part 2, who first said, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” Yin Weidong, CEO of Chinese biotech firm SinoVac, appears to have taken that advice seriously.
On his Beijing office desk are two plastic models of a virus, each blue core surrounded by spikes of red protein. From the time it started spreading in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late December, the virus contained virtually every waking moment for the scientist.
The pandemic that we now know as COVID-19 is sweeping across all continents. In the dozens of daily infection charts, broken down by nation and taped from floor to ceiling on the wall of the Yin office, the numbers tell a horrible story: 16 million infections and 640,000 deaths worldwide, including 146,000 American lives lost until Monday.
But if the enemy is close, so is a possible new friend. Yin’s desk now also houses several small glass vials of SinoVac’s COVID-19 vaccine, called CoronaVac, which began phase 3 trials with 9,000 volunteers in Brazil last week. (A phase 1 trial involves small groups of patients to verify that a vaccine has no negative side effects, and a phase two trial generally tests a combination of safety and efficacy, while a phase 3 trial is like a phase 2 trial. but it involves many more participants.)
“Looking at the collected data, I think we have an 80% more chance of success,” says Yin.
Normally, moving from pathogen identification through phase 3 trials in approximately 10 years is considered fast. The mumps vaccine is generally considered the fastest ever developed in four years. But if all goes well, CoronaVac could be ready for regulatory approval early next year. Not that Yin is satisfied.
“Do you really think this is fast? Compared to the spread of the virus, it’s not fast enough, ”he says, grudgingly holding his plastic nemesis up. “This is how we should measure our progress.”
During the SARS outbreak from 2002 to 2003, which claimed more than 774 lives worldwide, SinoVac was the only company to enter into phase 1 vaccine trials, but the pandemic suddenly disappeared. That meant the investigation was suspended at a great loss to the company. However, it was not entirely wasted. Now, 17 years later, SinoVac can take advantage of that previous work, since COVID-19 is very similar to SARS. He and the coronavirus are “like brothers,” says Yin.
Still, creating an effective vaccine is only a third of the battle. The other two cornerstones of vaccine development are production capacity and regulatory approval. Currently, the FDA equivalent of each nation would need to approve CoronaVac independently, although given the unprecedented need, there are talks about rationalization.
“The virus does not require a passport, but the vaccine must be licensed by all countries,” says Yin.
SinoVac aims to triple the current capacity to produce 300 million doses per year. That may sound impressive, but accessibility is likely to be a big problem. Given that it will take at least two doses to immunize a person, it would still take nearly a decade to vaccinate everyone in China, regardless of sharing the vaccine with the 7.6 billion people in the world.
“If only one or two countries protect themselves, this will not solve the problem and will bring economic activity back to normal,” says Yin.
SinoVac is not the only company with a potential vaccine under clinical evaluation. According to the WHO, there are more than 20 companies worldwide involved in the task with more than 130 vaccines in development. But given the magnitude of the need, there will be no quick solution to the pandemic.
Another candidate vaccine, developed by the American Modern biotechnology firm with the National Institutes of Health, elicited the desired immune response in a test of 45 individuals and is about to enter phase 3 trials. It works by introducing a sequence mRNA, a molecule that tells cells what to build, encoded for a disease-specific antigen. Once produced inside the body, the immune system registers the antigen, allowing it to fight the actual virus.
But while such RNA vaccines, as they are known, have multiple benefits, including speed of production, they must be stored at sub-zero temperatures. This means that its distribution to remote populations is problematic. While SinoVac initially experimented with RNA and other vaccine prototypes, they found that a traditional inactivated virus vaccine produced the best results. Under normal conditions, Yin believes that CoronaVac has a useful life of three years.
“The purpose of this work is not to find out which technology is better,” says Yin. “The purpose is to control the disease.”
In principle, SinoVac is a private company that owns CoronaVac as licensed intellectual property, which means that distribution of the vaccine must be a purely commercial decision. However, the Chinese government has contributed the estimated one billion renminbi (about $ 140 million) that the company is investing in CoronaVac. This and other contributions from international NGOs currently under negotiation are accompanied by distribution commitments.
In a speech to the World Health Assembly on May 18, Chinese President Xi Jinping promised to make the COVID-19 vaccine produced in China a “global public good.” In reality, of course, each row has someone behind it, which means there will be a lot of priority pushing, and potentially boosting Beijing’s global influence.
According to Benjamin N. Gedan, a former regional director of the White House National Security Council and now with the Wilson Center, “if China produces the first coronavirus vaccine on a scale, it would be an extraordinary diplomatic tool anywhere in the world.”
SinoVac has already committed to sharing 60-100 million doses in Brazil through a collaboration with the São Paulo-based Butantan Institute, which is conducting the phase 3 study. In Asia, the firm is “actively discussing with various countries, “says Yin, including Indonesia and Turkey, and is exploring options in Europe. She has also had more than 30 meetings with WHO to update the world health agency on her progress.
“We will share our vaccine with the world,” says Yin.
