VACCINE development faces a formidable challenge of too little and too many.
Only five pharmaceutical companies in the world’s seven richest countries have the capacity to scale up vaccine manufacturing, said Thomas B. Cueni, director-general of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations (IFPMA), the global association of research-based pharmaceutical companies.
And yet the World Health Organization estimates vaccine against the coronavirus will require up to 15 billion doses, Cueni said at the Health for Juan and Juana virtual forum on Wednesday.
“It’s a daunting challenge,” he said, adding decisions on vaccine distribution need to be made. Biopharmaceutical companies are committed to making COVID-19 products available and affordable to those that need them, he said.
“We will be able to respond to the fair allocation of vaccines. I hope we will have significant volumes available, and the first ones to be vaccinated are the health workers.”
Cueni believes a vaccine will be available “hopefully” by October. “But it doesn’t mean scalability.”
He would rather have something safe by summer next year rather than have one soon that carry risks.
The corona virus has been known for many years and research and development (R&D) could be a lot faster this time.
However, Cueni cautioned “we cannot cut corners, we need to be sure that vaccine effective and efficient but also safe.”
On April 30, biopharmaceutical companies pooled R&D resources and expertise to fasttrack, without compromising safety and quality, anti-COVID vaccine and drug development. They will work with governments to ensure treatments and vaccines are available and affordable for all.
Some 25 R&D biopharmaceutical companies are now conducting clinical trials and sharing real-time clinical trial data with governments and other companies.
Soon after the SARS-CoV-2 genome was made public and shared in January, biopharmaceutical companies screened their libraries of medicines for potential treatments. Individually or in collaboration, they are now repurposing dozens of different therapies including anti-malarials, anti-inflammatory, anti-virals, auto-immune, anti-inflammatories/inhibitors and plasma treatments and testing their safety and effectiveness.
A fiercely competitive industry that thrives on high risks and high rewards R&D supported by strong intellectual property protection have decided for their scientists and engineers to collaborate, Cueni said.
In a landmark global partnership launched April 24, the IFPMA as well as biotech, self-medication, diagnostic and medical technology companies put aside competition and now collaborate with each other, academe and research institutions in what the industry calls an “unprecedented levels of collaboration” in studying more than 130 COVID-19 therapeutic candidates.
The industry has a “deep sense of responsibility to flatten and contain the curve,” Cueni said.
He pointed to partnerships not seen in the past: big pharma collaborating with each other and with small biotechnology companies and academe to work for a vaccine by next year. “I’m sure science will win,” Cueni said.
“It took the pandemic to get us to talk to each other and share data,” said Dr. Beaver Tamesis, president of the Pharmaceutical and Health Care Association of the Philippines, in the same forum.
“Right now there are seven candidate vaccines under clinical evaluation,” Tamesis said, adding there are 133 potential treatments under study and 82 candidate vaccines under pre-clinical evaluation before they are tested on humans.
Before the pandemic, it took 14 years on average to discover and test a new medicine before it is made available for patients, Tamesis said. “Developing diagnostics, vaccines and treatments is a complex and risky process,” he said, pointing out that only or two make it to the market.
“The whole business that has been accepted as reality before has changed,” said Eduardo Banzon, the Asian Development Bank’s principal health specialist. “Nobody now talks about patents when talking of vaccines.”
It’s another way of doing business in health, he said, pointing out that countries are now talking about vaccine self-sufficiency. “In Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore and Indonesia have good vaccine manufacturing capabilities. Give vaccine manufacturing to them, make vaccine a public good.”
This is what COVID has done to us, Banzon said. “People are rethinking how we do business. The worse we can do is to go back in the old way of doing business, in the sense that we have not learned our lesson.”
“The take away message: going back to the old normal is a waste,” t said Dr. Manuel Dayrit, Dean of the Ateneo School of Medicine and Public Health.
