British pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca has struck a deal to supply Europe with a coronavirus vaccine.
The Cambridge-based firm has agreed to dish out up to 400million doses of its unproven jab in Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands.
Its AZD1222 vaccine, developed by Oxford University, is currently being trialled on more than 10,000 people and results are expected in August.
If the jab proves successful, AstraZeneca expects to dish out a billion doses globally by the end of 2020.
It has already inked deals to produce 400million for the US and 100million for the UK.
British ministers have agreed to pay for the doses ‘as early as possible’ and hope a third of those will be ready for September if proven effective.
British pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca has struck a deal to supply Europe with a coronavirus vaccine
AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot has said he expects to distribute a billion doses of the vaccine by the end of 2020
AstraZeneca struck the deal with Europe´s Inclusive Vaccines Alliance on Saturday, which guarantees the vaccine for Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands.
The agreement with AstraZeneca also aims to make the vaccine available to other European countries that wish to take part.
The agreement comes despite the fact there are no certainties the vaccine will work.
Following an initial phase of testing on 160 healthy volunteers between 18 and 55, the study of AZD1222 has moved to phases two and three.
It is now being trialled on more than 10,000 people, include children and the elderly, to see if it can prevent infection.
But because there are now so few cases of the coronavirus in the UK (just 1,400 people are being diagnosed every day) real-world clinical trials are difficult.
So Oxford has agreed to trial the vaccine on 2,000 healthcare workers in Brazil, where the virus is still rife.
AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot said: ‘This agreement will ensure that hundreds of millions of Europeans have access to Oxford University´s vaccine following approval.
‘With our European supply chain due to begin production soon, we hope to make the vaccine available widely and rapidly.’
The jab is being sold ‘at cost’, meaning AstraZeneca will make no profit from the supply of the vaccine in a bid to help halt the global pandemic.
But this will only be the case until the World Health Organization (WHO) officially brings the global threat level down.
Estimates suggests the world will need around 4.5billion vaccine doses to put an end to the pandemic.
The virus is so hard to track and spreads so easily that experts believe it will continue to spread through the human population indefinitely, if a vaccine cannot be found.
AstraZeneca announced a deal last month with Oxford BioMedica to manufacture the Covid vaccine at its manufacturing centre in Oxford.
AstraZeneca will have access to the company’s 84,000-square-foot factory and will turn out most of the clinical and commercial supply of the vaccine this year.
The firm also announced a licensing deal with the Serum Institute of India to provide 1billion doses of the vaccine to low- and middle-income countries by 2021.
The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (Cepi) in Norway and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, in Switzerland, will help manufacture 300million globally accessible doses of the coronavirus vaccine this year.
The vaccine is called AZD1222 and is made from a weakened version of a common cold virus (adenovirus) from chimpanzees that has been genetically changed so it is impossible for it to grow in humans.
The intellectual rights to its vaccine are owned by the University of Oxford and a spin-out company called Vaccitech.
Clinical teams at the Oxford University’s Jenner Institute and Oxford Vaccine Group began developing the vaccine in January. It’s a type of immunisation known as a recombinant viral vector vaccine.
Researchers place genetic material from the coronavirus into another virus that’s been modified. They will then inject the virus into a human, hoping to produce an immune response against SARS-CoV-2.
This virus, weakened by genetic engineering, is a type of virus called an adenovirus, the same as those which cause common colds, that has been taken from chimpanzees.
If the vaccines can successfully mimic the spikes inside a person’s bloodstream, and stimulate the immune system to create special antibodies to attack it, this could train the body to destroy the real coronavirus if they get infected with it in future.
It was developed so rapidly by Sarah Gilbert, a professor of vaccinology, and her team because they already had a base vaccine for similar coronaviruses.
The team have gone through stages of vaccine development that usually take five years in just months.