Tag: COVID-19 Vaccines

Britain on track for spring vaccine roll-out, Oxford researcher

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Britain is on track to make COVID-19 vaccines widely available by next spring after the shot developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca was up to 90% effective in trials, the head of the university’s Jenner Institute said on Monday.

The encouraging late-stage trial results were the third published among the seven vaccine candidates Britain has ordered, following on from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna earlier this month.

“I think we are on track for the timeline … to start getting this vaccine rolled out from December,” Adrian Hill, director of Oxford University’s Jenner Institute that developed the vaccine, told Reuters.

Britain has secured 100 million doses of the AstraZeneca shot, 40 million of the Pfizer vaccine and 5 million of Moderna’s candidate.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has highlighted the prospect of vaccines as a reason for optimism that things could improve by spring, after he introduced a second national lockdown in England this month to tackle rising infections.

“It’s marvellous,” said 59-year-old Jo Canilleri. “Hopefully we won’t take that long before we can actually get it, because … a lot of people are just ignoring this. It’s not a thing that you can ignore. I mean look at the lives we’ve lost.”

In Britain 55,000 people have died from COVID-19, the highest death toll in Europe.

Hill said high-risk groups would receive the vaccine before it was rolled out to everyone in spring.

“I think that could be done. It’s going to be an enormous effort … hopefully there will be vaccine available for all adults, but that’s likely to be springtime rather than in January,” Hill said.

BACK TO NORMAL?

AstraZeneca executive Pam Cheng said there would be enough supplies of the active ingredient in the vaccine to provide Britain with 20 million doses by the end of the year and 70 million by the end of March.

She said that would translate into 4 million finished doses this year and 40 million by the end of March. The vaccine is also being manufactured by other AstraZeneca partners.

Britain’s health minister has asked the health service to be prepared to deliver vaccines from Dec. 1, although he said he expects the bulk of the roll-out to happen next year.

Initial late-stage trial results published on Monday showed that a regimen of two full doses was 62% effective in shielding people from COVID-19, though the efficacy rate jumped to 90% if the first shot was only half a normal dose.

Britain expects to receive 10 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine, which was 95% effective in trials, this year but the fact it needs to be stored at minus 70 degrees Celsius could pose logistical challenges for a mass roll-out.

Britain won’t receive any Moderna vaccines, which were 94.5% effective based on initial results, until next spring.

Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group and chief investigator into the trial, said the results for all the shots released so far showed they could help protect against severe cases of COVID-19, which in turn would help Britain’s National Health Service (NHS).

“That, to me, means that, whichever of the vaccines we could deploy we’re likely to be able to prevent people going into hospital clogging up, in this country, the NHS and allow us to at least get that bit of the system back to normal,” he told Reuters.

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

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Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

Gates Foundation adds $70 million more funding for COVID vaccines for poor

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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The Gates Foundation added another USD 70 million of funding on Thursday to global efforts to develop and distribute vaccines and treatments against the COVID-19 pandemic, saying it hoped other international donors would now also pledge more.

An extra USD 50 million will go to the COVAX Advance Market Commitment (AMC) led by the GAVI vaccine alliance, the foundation said, and another USD 20 million to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) which is co-funding development of several COVID-19 vaccine candidates.

”We have to ensure that everyone gets equal access to tests, drugs, and vaccines when they are available – no matter where you live in the world,” the foundation’s co-chair Melinda Gates said in a statement. ”Our pledge today… means we are getting closer to having the resources needed to help the world fight this virus.”

Along with the World Health Organization, CEPI and GAVI are co-leading a global scheme known as the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator which aims to speed up development, production and fair access to COVID-19 drugs, tests and vaccines.

Also Read: Pfizer, BioNTech say their COVID-19 vaccine is effective, citing Phase 3 data

GAVI has said the COVAX facility, which is part of the scheme, aims to have secured 2 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines by the end of 2021. It says doses will be made available to people in all COVAX participating countries, with almost a billion doses available to the 92 poorest countries through the Advanced Market Commitment (AMC).

Preliminary positive data this week from trials of two potential COVID-19 shots – one from Pfizer and BioNtech and one developed in Russia – are encouraging signs that the first vaccines against the pandemic disease may be ready to be deployed before the end of 2020.

Mark Suzman, the Gates Foundation’s chief executive officer, told reporters in an online briefing that this was ”an auspicious week” to be adding to global funding efforts.

Also Read: Moderna closes in on release of COVID-19 vaccine data

The vaccine news ”makes us hopeful about a number of the other vaccine products in the pipeline,” he said. ”But there’s still a long way to go between that and getting vaccines approved (by regulators), and then into people who need them at the scale and with the kind of equitable global distribution we really need to bring the virus under control.”

The Gates Foundation began pledging funds for the vaccines AMC in June, and the extra USD 50 million brings its total pledges to USD 156 million. The new funds will also unlock an extra 12.5 million pounds (USD 16.5 mln) from Britain, which had promised to part-match other contributions.

Also, catch all the latest updates and trends on the novel coronavirus with CNBCTV18’s blog.

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

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Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

Global share markets: Vaccine progress and Biden win power stocks to record peak

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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World stocks climbed to new record highs on Monday as a promising vaccine development from Pfizer and expectations global trade ties will improve under U.S. President-elect Joe Biden boosted risk appetite.

Markets started to trade on the prospect of a Biden presidency last week, but the Democratic candidate’s projected victory on Saturday gave more fuel to the move.

Further boosting sentiment was data showing that Pfizer’s experimental vaccine was more than 90% effective in preventing COVID-19, potentially a big move forward in the fight against the pandemic.

The MSCI world equity index, which tracks shares in 49 countries, rallied after the news broke to reach another record high, up more than 1% on the day. On Friday, it posted its biggest one-week gain in nearly seven months.

“The relief rally in equity seems very strong. It also seems to have taken people off-guard,” said Arne Petimezas, analyst at AFS in Amsterdam.

The pan-European STOXX 600 climbed almost 4% by 1203 GMT, back to February levels and driven by shares in sectors like airlines and travel. Among other risky assets, oil shot up nearly 8%, while safe-haven bonds and gold sold off.

E-mini futures for the S&P 500 also got a boost, jumping nearly 4% to a record high, although Nasdaq futures remained just under their all-time peak, up 1.7%.

Monday’s vaccine progress reinforced expectations that the economic damage from the pandemic would be temporary, even if conditions could still weaken further.

“With Europe in lockdown, and lockdown risk in the U.S., near-term data is likely to look poor,” strategists at French bank Exane led by Dennis Jose said.

“However, if a vaccine is approved, it opens up a scenario where consumers unleash their supersized savings, enabling investors to look through near-term weakness.”

FAVOURABLE SCENARIO

Earlier, MSCI’s broadest index of Asia Pacific shares outside Japan jumped 1.4% after hitting its highest since January 2018 on expectations of easing trade tensions following the U.S. election.

U.S. President Donald Trump has not conceded defeat and is challenging the outcome of the vote but many current and past global leaders have already congratulated Biden.

“The die is cast,” said Andrea Delitala, portfolio manager and head of euro multi-asset strategy at Pictet Asset Management in Milan.

“The U.S. elections have returned a favourable scenario (for) investors, freeing them from the unpredictability of the leader of the world’s leading economy … a return of multilateralism is on the cards,” he added.

Investors expect Republicans to maintain control of the Senate, making it harder for a Biden administration to push through major policy changes, from a planned tax hike to a big fiscal stimulus package.

That would mean better earnings prospects for companies exposed to the world’s largest economy but also that the U.S. Federal Reserve might have to step in to provide any further support the pandemic-hit economy may need.

Oil prices jumped as investors greeted the vaccine news and the prospect of a Biden victory, shrugging off worries about lacklustre demand. Brent prices added 8% to $42.6.

Spot gold fell 1.8% to $1,914.96 per ounce.

The dollar remained weak on expectations that monetary policy in the United States will remain easy and global trade relations improve.

After posting its biggest weekly loss in more than seven months on Friday, the dollar index was up 0.2% to just above a 10-week low, while growth and trade proxies such as the Australian dollar and the Chinese yuan remained in demand.

The euro, which climbed 1.9% last week, was up 0.1%. Sterling added 0.2% as the focus turned to Brexit trade negotiations which could come to a head with the European Union summit on Nov. 15.

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

Very large portion of COVID-19 vaccines likely to be manufactured in India: Gates Foundation CEO

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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A very large portion of COVID-19 vaccines are likely to be manufactured in India through the country’s strong and robust private sector partners, said Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman. In an interview to PTI, Suzman noted that India is doing everything it can right now with the resources at hand to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.

”I think India is doing everything it can right now with the resources at hand, but we are all hopeful that next year as some of these vaccines should come out…and our expectation is that a very large portion of these are likely to be manufactured in India through the strong and robust Indian private sector partners and then that will be the key area to focus on in the next phase of the COVID pandemic, he said. He underlined the need to have equitable global distribution of COVID-19 vaccines.

”We believe passionately that there needs to be equitable global distribution, so everything we are doing is to make sure that the developing countries will be able to have access at the same time and at the same volumes as wealthy countries, because for a global pandemic that is essential, but then the exact pacing and distribution within the countries is going to depend on national guidelines with some of the global recommendations,” he said. He said the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has been working at multiple levels to combat COVID-19.

”We have been providing support, so-called upstream, or research and development. We work with this organization, CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation, which has been a leading partner in investing in the potential vaccines. We have developed something called a therapeutic accelerator which has raised over USD 125 million to help find treatments that are going to be effective against COVID, he said.

He said the foundation has been working to support a lot of work around diagnostics as well. ”And in that context, we are strong supporters of this global effort, which India is part of, called COVAX, which is a multilateral initiative to procure vaccines at scale and then distribute them through the GAVI vaccine alliance to countries including India,” Suzman added.

And last but not least, we have also been directly supporting some specific investments, again some with Indian partners like Serum Institute of India and GAVI around particular vaccines which are very promising in order to make sure many of the products are being manufactured in real-time and even ahead of regulatory approval for potential distribution because we want to make sure that the distribution goes to developing countries at the same time as rich countries, that you don’t have the time lag with rich countries having bought up early available market, which have been the risk, he said.

He said the biggest learning from the pandemic is that at all levels, global, regional, national, there needs to be a permanent infrastructure in place that is prepared and ready to go which will keep the world much better prepared for the next one, which will come.

”It is not as if the pandemic was really that much of a surprise, maybe the scale, the speed and the exact nature of the pathogen could not have been predicted but as Bill Gates and others have been warning for years, this has been one of the most likely global crises, he said. But we know that unknown pathogens have the potential to come in and wreak havoc so we should never again be caught flat-footed. We need a global infrastructure, regional infrastructure and national infrastructure and right down to the community health level, he added.

Responding to a question on how the Grand Challenges platform is relevant for the current pandemic situation, he said some of the networks and groups of scientists that joined the Grand Challenges are working hard on many aspects of COVID-19. They also provided the platform that looks at related issues which is empowering scientific leadership in developing countries, particularly women, to think about what the long-term issues of the future are going to be or the present and the future, including but beyond COVID-19, he said.

Grand Challenges India was set up as a partnership of the Department of Biotechnology, Government of India, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2012, and Wellcome also joined the partnership. Grand Challenges India works across a range of health and developmental priorities ranging from agriculture, nutrition, sanitation, maternal and child health to infectious diseases.

Also, catch all the latest updates and trends on the novel coronavirus with CNBCTV18’s blog.

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

Vaccine cooperation, recovery could boost global income $9 trillion by 2025: IMF chief

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Strong international cooperation on COVID-19 vaccines could speed up the world economic recovery and add USD 9 trillion (6.9 trillion pounds) to global income by 2025, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said on Thursday.

Speaking at a news conference after a meeting of the IMF’s steering committee, Georgieva also called on the United States and China to keep up strong economic stimulus that could help boost a global recovery. She emphasized the need for vaccines to be distributed evenly across the world in both developing countries and wealthy nations, to boost confidence in travel, investment, trade and other activities.

”If we may make fast progress everywhere, we could speed up the recovery. And we can add almost USD 9 trillion to global income by 2025, and that in turn could help narrow the income gap between richer and poorer nations,” Georgieva said. ”We need strong international cooperation and this is most urgent today for vaccine development and distribution,” she said.

Equitable and affordable access to COVID-19 therapeutics and vaccines globally will be key to avoiding long-lasting scars on the world economy, the IMF’s International Monetary and Financial Committee said in its statement. Georgieva also said she had ”no doubt” that the US Congress and the White House would ultimately agree on another spending package but was uncertain about the timing. Some USD 3 trillion in US stimulus spending earlier this year ”has been an important positive impulse and we would like to see how it would be continued again,” she said.

MORE PARTICIPANTS

The committee said private creditors’ and official bilateral creditors’ participation in debt relief for poor countries is essential, with Georgieva adding that ”further private sector participation is still needed, and it remains an outstanding issue.”

The G20 on Wednesday approved a six-month extension to mid-2021 of the Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI) that freezes official bilateral debt payments and said they would consider a further six-month extension in April. But private creditors and lenders outside the Paris Club are not fully participating.

”We are disappointed by the absence of progress of private creditors’ participation in the DSSI, and strongly encourage them to participate on comparable terms when requested by eligible countries,” the steering committee said while encouraging ”the full participation of official bilateral creditors.”

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

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Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

Is the global supply chain for delivering vaccines ready?

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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The International Air Transport Association (IATA) has urged governments to carefully plan the delivery of COVID-19 vaccines with industry stakeholders. The association has sought that world bodies should ensure they are prepared when a vaccine in launched so that distribution is seamless.

IATA also warned governments of potential constraints in transporting the vaccines by air. With pharma companies constantly working towards developing vaccines, one question remains unanswered, which is whether we are prepared for mass delivery.

Neel Jones Shah, global head of air carrier relationships at San Francisco-based freight forwarder Flexport said: “We are not.”

The industry that shepherds goods from around the world on ships, airplanes and trucks has acknowledged the challenges of shipping the vaccine.

“Let’s all be honest here, vaccine supply chains are exponentially more complex than PPE supply chain,” Jones said, referring to personal protective equipment like surgical masks and gloves. “You can’t ruin PPE by leaving it on the tarmac for a couple of days. You will destroy vaccines.”

Apart from Russia’s vaccine and some in China that are in final-stage trials, Moderna and Pfizer are on late-stage testing. China has three of its vaccines in final stage trials.

With so many candidates working round the clock, its only a matter of time before the vaccine would be ready to be transported to 7.3 billion people across the globe.

Considering vaccines, they will have to be kept at low temperatures, around minus 70 degrees and vaccines by different manufacturers would have different storage requirements.

Other logistical considerations include, security to protect them from theft, trained staff to handle them and accessing regulatory approvals across borders.

What we have right now is a huge logistical nightmare. We do not know the kind of treatment the vaccines will demand – their temperature sensitivities, manufacturing locations and date of shipment.

As it turns out, it’s not just the pharma industry fighting to get the vaccines prepared, the next step is just as hard, for the air cargo industry to ship it across the globe.

“Safely delivering COVID-19 vaccines will be the mission of the century for the global air cargo industry. But it won’t happen without careful advance planning. And the time for that is now,” said IATA Director General and CEO Alexandre de Juniac.

The industry is in the process of developing strategies to distribute as many as 20 billion vaccination doses although regulators have not approved any treatments.

Without having any exact information about vaccines and the measures that need to be taken to protect them from harm, the industry has to plan, and they are urging governments to do the same.

“We urge governments to take the lead in facilitating cooperation across the logistics chain so that the facilities, security arrangements and border processes are ready for the mammoth and complex task ahead,” added de Juniac.

For starters, the government should consider the reduced capacity of the aviation industry. According to an IATA approximation, they need over 8,000 jumbo jets to send one single does of vaccine around the globe.

Which is a big problem because over the past few months, after facing back-to-back shocks, the industry had put airplanes in storage. While that was their immediate response to cut costs, it has also curtailed the global network that would have aided in distribution.

“Even if we assume that half the needed vaccines can be transported by land, the air cargo industry will still face its largest single transport challenge ever. In planning their vaccine programs, particularly in the developing world, governments must take very careful consideration of the limited air cargo capacity that is available at the moment. If borders remain closed, travel curtailed, fleets grounded and employees furloughed, the capacity to deliver life-saving vaccines will be very much compromised,” said de Juniac.

Companies like FedEx, DHL, UPS and Deutsche Lufthansa AG have started introducing systems to make delivery easier. Then again, delivering vaccines is nothing new for these companies.

Pharmaceutical products make up for 1.9 percent of the global air-cargo volume, making them one of the most valuable categories for cargo. These carriers have supply chains in place to pull this off; they know how and where to start. The only roadblock is that they have never had such huge volumes before. And they were never so uncertain about the exact handling conditions of their orders before.

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

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Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

British PM hails India’s vaccine efforts in his UN General Assembly address

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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British Prime Minister Boris Johnson made a special reference to India’s role in the manufacture and access to one of the most promising coronavirus vaccine candidates currently undergoing trials during his address to the United Nations (UN) General Assembly.

In reference to the vaccine being worked on by the University of Oxford, Johnson stressed the importance of equitable access of any successful vaccine because the health of every country depends on the whole world having access to a safe and effective vaccine, wherever a breakthrough might occur.

“As I speak there are 100 potential vaccines that are trying to clear the hurdles of safety and efficacy, as if in a giant global steeplechase, Johnson said in a prerecorded speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Saturday.

“The Oxford vaccine is now in Stage 3 of clinical trials, and in case of success AstraZeneca has already begun to manufacture millions of doses, in readiness for rapid distribution, and they have reached agreement with the Serum Institute of India to supply 1 billion doses to low and middle-income countries,” he said.

Declaring that “humanity was caught napping” as the pandemic struck and has been “scrabbling to catch up” ever since, Johnson issued a spirited defence of the World Health Organisation as the one body that marshals humanity against the legions of disease and confirmed increased investment that would make the UK the largest state donor to the UN health agency if US President Donald Trump’s exit from the multilateral body goes through next year.

He pushed for greater international collaboration to fight a common enemy such as the virus and urged countries to reach across borders and repair “ugly rifts” and “heal the world”.

“And after nine months of fighting COVID-19, the very notion of the international community looks, frankly, pretty tattered. And we know that we simply can’t continue in this way. Unless we get our act together,” he said.

“That is why we in the UK global Britain are one of the biggest global funders of that organisation, contributing 340 million pounds over the next four years, that’s an increase of 30 per cent,” Johnson said.

The biggest single donor to the efforts of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness to find a vaccine and contribution of up to 571 million pounds to COVAX, a new initiative designed to distribute a COVID-19 vaccine across the world, were among some of the other UK initiatives Johnson sought to highlight in his address.

He also called for honesty to reach a joint understanding of how the pandemic began and how it was able to spread as a “moral imperative”, indicating that he had no intention of finger-pointing at China.

“Not because I want to blame any country or government, or to score points. I simply believe as a former COVID patient that we all have a right to know, so that we can collectively do our best to prevent a recurrence,” he said.

“And as we now send our medical detectives to interview the witnesses and the suspects bats, the pangolins, whoever we should have enough humility to acknowledge that alarm bells were ringing before this calamity struck,” he said.

Describing the pandemic as an “immense psychic shock” to the human race, he declared it outrageous that such a “microscopic enemy” should have routed the unity of the human race as he condemned the perverse ranking of death tolls across different regions of the world.

“COVID-19 has caused us to cease other vital work, and I’m afraid it made individual nations seem selfish and divided from each other. Every day people were openly encouraged to study a grisly reverse Olympic league table, and to take morbid and totally mistaken comfort in the greater sufferings of others, he said. “We cannot go on like that, we cannot make these mistakes again, he concluded.

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

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Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

Cambridge University kicks off vaccine race to fight all coronaviruses

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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The University of Cambridge on Wednesday confirmed plans to begin trials of a potential new vaccine not only against COVID-19 but all coronaviruses that may spill over from animals to humans in the future.

The new vaccine candidate, DIOS-CoVax2, uses banks of genetic sequences of all known coronaviruses, including those from bats, believed to be the natural hosts of many relatives of human coronaviruses.

A vaccine that clears all trials can then be delivered pain-free without a needle into the skin through a spring-powered jet injection.

“Our approach involves 3D computer modelling of the SARS-CoV-2 [Covid-19] virus’ structure. It uses information on the virus itself as well as its relatives SARS, MERS and other coronaviruses carried by animals that threaten to ‘spill-over’ to humans again to cause future human epidemics,” said Professor Jonathan Heeney, head of the Laboratory of Viral Zoonotics at the University of Cambridge, and founder of DIOSynVax, a Cambridge spin-out company.

“We’re looking for chinks in its armour, crucial pieces of the virus that we can use to construct the vaccine to direct the immune response in the right direction. Ultimately we aim to make a vaccine that will not only protect from SARS-CoV-2, but also other related coronaviruses that may spill over from animals to humans,” he said.

Prof Heeney said his team’s strategy involves targeting those domains of the virus’ structure that are absolutely critical for docking with a cell, while avoiding the parts that could make things worse.

“What we end up with is a mimic, a synthetic part of the virus minus those non-essential elements that could trigger a bad immune response,” he added.

His team have developed libraries of computer-generated antigen structures encoded by synthetic genes that can train the human immune system to target key regions of the virus and to produce beneficial anti-viral responses.

These immune responses include neutralising antibodies, which block virus infection, and T-cells, which remove virus-infected cells.
This so-called laser-specific computer generated approach is able to help avoid the adverse hyper-inflammatory immune responses that can be triggered by recognition of the wrong parts on the coronavirus’ surface.

“Most research groups have used established approaches to vaccine development because of the urgent need to tackle the pandemic. We all hope the current clinical trials have a positive outcome, but even successful vaccines are likely to have their limitations they may be unsuitable for vulnerable people, and we do not know how long their effects will last for, for example,” said

Dr Rebecca Kinsley, Chief Operating Officer of DIOSynVax and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge.

“Our approach using synthetic DNA to deliver custom designed, immune selected vaccine antigens is revolutionary and is ideal for complex viruses such as coronavirus. If successful, it will result in a vaccine that should be safe for widespread use and that can be manufactured and distributed at low cost,” she said.

DIOS-CoVax2, which hopes to go into human trials by later this year, is the latest vaccine candidate to be backed by the UK government with 1.9 million pounds in funding as part of a collaboration between DIOSynVax, which is contributing an additional 400,000 pounds to the trial, the University of Cambridge and the University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust.

The team say their proposed new vaccine can be freeze-dried as a powder and is therefore heat stable, meaning that it does not need to be cold-stored. This makes transport and storage much more straightforward, particularly important in low and middle income countries, and it can be delivered through PharmaJet Tropis intradermal Needle-free Injection System, which delivers the vaccine in less than a 1/10th of a second jet injection.

Professor Saul Faust, Director of the NIHR Southampton Clinical Research Facility, said: “It is especially exciting that the clinical trial will test giving the vaccine through people’s skin using a device without any needles as together with stable DNA vaccine technology this could be a major breakthrough in being able to give a future vaccine to huge numbers of people across the world.”

The news comes as the University of Oxford revealed that its trials of a potential vaccine against COVID-19 being developed with AstraZeneca could be put before regulators this year if scientists are able to gather enough data.

The Oxford vaccine, as it is commonly known, showed early promise in the first human trial when it produced an immune response, underlining its position as one of the leading candidates in the race to help vaccinate humans against the deadly novel coronavirus.

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

Wockhardt shares jump 10% on pact with UK govt to supply COVID-19 vaccines

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Shares of Wockhardt surged 10 percent on Tuesday after the pharma major announced a partnership with the UK Government to supply COVID-19 vaccines. The company has entered into an agreement with the UK Government to ‘fill-finish’ COVID-19 vaccines. The stock has risen as much as 10 percent in intra-day deals to Rs 333.70 per share on BSE. In the last 3 days, the stock has rallied nearly 27 percent on this.

‘Fill-finish’ is the stage of a manufacturing process that includes dispensing the vaccine into vials and prepare it to be distributed.

The government has reserved one fill and finish production line for its exclusive use for the next 18 months in order to guarantee the supply of vaccines required to fight COVID-19 in the UK, the company said.

The manufacturing will be undertaken at CP Pharmaceuticals, a subsidiary of Wockhardt based in Wrexham, North Wales.

As per the terms of the agreement the company has reserved manufacturing capacity to allow for the supply of multiple vaccines to the UK Government in its fight against COVID-19, including AZD1222, the vaccine co-invented by the University of Oxford and its spin-out company, Vaccitech and licensed by AstraZeneca.

Habil Khorakiwala, Founder Chairman of Wockhardt said the company has total capacity in the UK and India to fill and finish one billion doses of vaccine.

The company will start manufacturing in September. The UK government plans to manufacture about 60 million doses of vaccine till the end of the year or early next year.

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow