INTERVIEW
The search for a vaccine against the coronavirus is a major issue in the face of the epidemic, which has already killed 810,000 people worldwide. At the end of July, the Moderna laboratory announced that its vaccine would enter the final phase of clinical trials, with tests on 30,000 people. But where are the other laboratories in this race? In the program La France bouge on Europe 1, Wednesday, the boss of Sanofi France, Olivier Bogillot, advanced on a possible marketing of the vaccine in spring 2021.
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"A vaccine generally takes several years. There, we are in a race against time to do it in less than 18 months, sometimes a year", explains Olivier Bogillot. "We hope to be able to market a vaccine at the end of the first quarter, at the start of the second quarter of 2021."
A healthy "competition" between laboratories?
This remains for the time being a hypothetical date, because this vaccine is less advanced in terms of clinical phases than that of the American Moderna. We must therefore wait for the end of clinical trials, then an assessment by regulatory agencies and national recommendations, given in France by the Haute Autorité de Santé (HAS).
And Olivier Bogillot also wants to be very careful about the availability of such a vaccine for the population: "Finding a vaccine with good research will not be enough", tempers the leader of the French laboratory. "When you have to inject a vaccine into several billion people, you have to make sure you have the production capacity."
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This is the reason why the boss of Sanofi France militates for a "form of emulation between the different laboratories", because "the competition allows to have more factories in the world to produce more vaccines. It will be necessary to produce billions of doses, (…) it's a race where you need several winners. "
All stages "at the same time"
Olivier Bogillot finally recalls that the development of this vaccine against Covid-19 is done in a special way at Sanofi: "Rather than carrying out successive stages of research, development and production, we do everything at the same time. We buy raw materials for production even though we do not yet have the results of our vaccine tests. "
>> Find all the shows of La France bouge in replay and podcast here
The Sanofi laboratory, associated with the British GSK, concluded an agreement with the European Union at the end of July to provide 300 million doses when the vaccine would be available. In total, Sanofi has entered into several agreements to supply 460 million doses to the European Union, the United Kingdom (60 million) and the United States (100 million).