ISLAMABAD: The University of Health Sciences (UHS) in Lahore has approved holding a phase III trial of another Chinese coronavirus vaccine, its vice chancellor was reported as saying by local media on Friday. 

The trials for ZF2001, a recombinant novel coronavirus vaccine, would start next week, UHS Vice Chancellor Professor Javed Akram said. 

ZF2001, trade-named RBD-Dimer, is a COVID-19 vaccine candidate developed by Anhui Zhifei Longcom in collaboration with the Institute of Microbiology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. As of December 2020, the vaccine candidate was in Phase III trials with 29,000 participants in China, Ecuador, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Uzbekistan. If the trials are successful, the company plans to make 300 million doses of the vaccine each year.

“We are expecting the trial’s approval from the Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan during this week after which the recruitment of volunteers will start,” Akram said, adding that a 1,000 volunteers would be registered for the trial.

The VC said the National Bio-Ethics Committee had approved a phase-III randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of ZF2001 in people over 18 years of age. A double-blind study is one in which neither the participants nor the experimenters know who is receiving a particular treatment. The procedure prevents bias in research results.

During the UHS trial, each volunteer would be given three doses of the vaccine in three months. The trial would be completed in 18 months, Akram added. 

This week, Russia’s Sputnik-V became the third COVID-19 vaccine to be approved by Pakistan for emergency use after China’s Sinopharm and the ones developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University. 

A fourth vaccine candidate, developed by CanSino Biologics Inc. (CanSinoBIO), has also completed clinical trials in the South Asian nation of 220 million people, showing 65.7% efficacy in symptomatic cases and a 90.98% success rate in severe cases in an interim analysis of global trials, health chief Dr. Faisal Sultan said on Monday.

He said its efficacy in the Pakistani subset at preventing symptomatic cases was 74.8%. It was 100% for preventing severe disease.