GENOA (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 27th May, 2020) ENOA, Italy, May 27 (Sputnik), Anastasia Levchenko - A COVID-19 vaccine is unlikely to enter use before 2021 but governments could take steps to provide funding, which would ensure that any successful vaccine could reach the market immediately after all necessary trials, cutting up to six months off the wait time, Medicines for Europe Director GENOA (Pakistan Point news / Sputnik - 27th May, 2020) eneral Adrian van den Hoven told Sputnik in an interview.
According to the World Health Organization, 124 potential vaccines against COVID-19 are currently undergoing clinical and preclinical trials in a range of countries. On Friday, a leading official at the Russian Health Ministry's center for infectious disease told reporters that Russia may finish clinical tests on volunteers by fall, expressing confidence that a vaccine will be ready by the end of the year. Other countries, such as Italy, are predicting to have a vaccine ready for the market by the spring of 2021.
"I think a vaccine by the end of the year is very optimistic. I think that will take a little bit more time for approval because there are different phases of the regulatory testing that have to be done and they can be shortened in duration, but they still need to be done. So that is a very ambitious timetable. I think it will take a little bit longer. Sometime in 2021 I think is more realistic," van den Hoven said.
The association chief noted that the production of vaccines is complex and necessitates the use of large factories. This will be a challenge in the next phase, once any vaccine is developed and approved, van den Hoven remarked.
"I think the United States is doing the right thing, which is to basically take a risk and have the vaccines produced early, even though they are not certain they will work. That is very expensive, so not all countries want to make that kind of investment. But that is a very effective way," van den Hoven said.
The director general explained that such an investment means that if one of the vaccines under development looks promising, but is not yet approved by medical authorities, the government offers funds to have it manufactured in any case. Therefore, once it is approved, it is already produced and available to be put on the market, although this process contains risks if the treatment fails clinical testing.
"To my knowledge, so far, only the US government is doing that, I do not see any other government in the world using that model, as it is very expensive. But it gives you several, maybe six months of advantage, which is a lot. Compared to the cost of coronavirus, I guess it is not a huge amount of money," van den Hoven said.
European governments are still considering whether to take this step, the director general stated.
"I think they are considering this in Europe as well. They are considering doing so, but I do not know if they will or not," he added.
On Thursday, UK-based pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca announced that it had received more than $1 billion from the US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority for the development, production, and delivery of a vaccine against COVID-19 that is being produced by the University of Oxford. According to a press release, the pharmaceutical firm concluded an agreement for the production of at least 400 million doses of the vaccine.
Medicines for Europe is the alliance representing the generic and biosimilar pharmaceutical industries across the continent. Generic drugs are an exact copy of a brand-name drug when the latter's patent expires. Biosimilar medicines differ as they are are modeled off different treatments and are almost identical. Both kinds of drugs have cost and accessibility benefits, and close to 70 percent of drugs in Europe are either generic or biosimilar
