ISLAMABAD: Pakistan is going to start first-ever Phase 3 clinical trials of a COVID-19 vaccine developed by a Chinese company from next month, said top government officials on Tuesday, hoping that the trials in five major cities of the country would lead to mass production of a safe vaccine to treat the respiratory illness that has claimed over 750,000 lives across the globe since it emerged in last December.
A Chinese vaccine company CanSinoBio and Beijing Institute of Biotechnology have developed the vaccine, Recombinant Novel Coronavirus Vaccine Adenovirus Type 5 Vector (Ad5-nCoV), which successfully cleared the first two phases of trials.
“We are hoping to formally start clinical trials on five to eight thousand people from next month,” Dr. Ghazala Parveen, who heads the Biological Production Division at the National Institute of Health in Islamabad, told Arab News.
CanSinoBio is already conducting trials in different countries, including China, Russia, Chile and Argentina. It also plans to carry them out in Saudi Arabia in the coming days.
Parveen said the study would be conducted in prestigious medical research centers of the country in Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar, Quetta and Islamabad, adding that the progress made during these trials would also be keenly followed by global scientific community and other people around the world.
The AJM Pharma, a reputed national pharmaceutical company, NIH and CanSinoBio have signed an agreement to launch the trials in Pakistan’s Aga Khan Medical University (Karachi), Indus Hospital (Karachi), Shaukat Khanum Memorial Hospital (Lahore), Shifa International Hospital (Islamabad), and University of Health Sciences (Lahore).
Pakistan’s National Bioethics Committee and Clinical Trial Org – a global regulatory body for clinical trials – have also given approval for the tests.
“These trials will not only project a very positive image of Pakistan but also assure preferential vaccine supply and pricing for the country,” she said, adding that the initiative would result in public-private partnership to locally manufacture the vaccine and help the country attain self-reliance and self-sufficiency.
CanSinoBio was the first company in the world to move to Phase-II of clinical trials by initiating human testing. It published its Phase-I results in May 2020 and Phase-II trial results on July 20, 2020, in The Lancet, a well-known peer-reviewed medical journal.
“This third phase of the vaccine trials will help determine its safety and immunogenicity before its mass production,” Parveen said. “Being part of this activity, Pakistan will be among the countries that will have early access to the vaccine.”
