Japan Begins To Prepare Clinical Trials For COVID-19 Vaccines

Illustration of the COVID-19 vaccine (doc. Antara)

JAKARTA - The Japanese pharmaceutical laboratory, Shionogi, began preparing clinical trials for the COVID-19 vaccine. Production of the vaccine will be carried out at the end of 2021 to meet domestic needs.

According to Reuters, there are several vaccine candidates that Shionogi has made and will enter Phase 1 clinical trials in December and move to Phase 2 in January. According to Shionogi chief executive, Isao Teshirogi, his party will wait for approval from the Japanese government to start producing the vaccine.

The Shionogi plan produces a dose sufficient to inoculate 30 million people by the end of the year. However, the first large-scale production will only take place in March 2021 in Osaka.

"For national security reasons, having good capacity in Japan makes a lot of sense," said Teshirogi, Friday, October 30.

Despite falling behind the global vaccine race, Shionogi will still carry out a series of final stage clinical trials before going into mass production. French drug manufacturers Sanofi SA and Novavax are using a similar process with their COVID-19 vaccine candidates.

"I think our recombinant protein vaccine, method wise, has more data accumulating on efficacy and safety than the new method," said Teshirogi.

Newer methodologies such as the mRNA vaccine might be a solution, "but as of today, we didn't know anything," he said.

Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga has pledged to provide the public with sufficient vaccines by mid-2021, and Japan has reached deals for hundreds of millions of doses with companies including AstraZeneca Plc and Pfizer Inc.

Shionogi has received around US $ 400 million from the Japanese government for the production of the COVID-19 vaccine.

But the world will need several different vaccines to fight a pandemic, given the size of global demand, the effect on different populations, and the possible limits of effectiveness on the first vaccine.

Teshirogi said holding the postponed Tokyo Summer Olympics in 2021 was "still possible", but that it would rely more on very rapid diagnostic testing and logistics than vaccines. "Receiving a vaccine is not what is called a safe license," he said.