A researcher in a Beijing laboratory holds the human hopes of "Koronavac" between two fingers, an experimental vaccine against the coronavirus that has spilled the dreams of the world.
Senovac Biotec, which is conducting one of the four clinical trials that have been licensed in China for this vaccine, has announced significant progress in its research, and announced promising results in experiments on monkeys.
And while human trials have just begun, the company says it is ready to provide 100 million doses annually to fight the virus.
Thousands of doses of the vaccine have already been produced and packed in a white and orange box decorated with the name "Koronavac".
While the drug has a long way to go before approval, the company must demonstrate that it can be mass-produced and provide samples to be under the control of the authorities.
The World Health Organization warns that the development of any vaccine may take anywhere from 12 to 18 months, and Sinovac does not know when the half-milliliter injection will be ready for the market.
"This is the question that everyone always asks themselves," says Sinofac's director of brand management, Liu Beicheng.
Senovank, which is listed on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange, has expertise in mass production of drugs to treat global epidemics. It was the first drug company to market a swine flu vaccine in 2009.
More than 100 laboratories worldwide are scrambling to find a vaccine to treat corona, but only seven - including Synovac - are currently conducting clinical trials on vaccines they have developed, according to the London School of Health and Tropical Medicine.
Senovac released results showing its vaccine "largely protects" macaques from an epidemic in an animal experiment. The results of this vaccine have not yet been reviewed by the global scientific community.
The company has since conducted human trials, and tested the vaccine for 144 volunteers in April in eastern Jiangsu Province. Sinovac, which has about 1,000 employees, is hoping to reach results on its product safety by the end of June after the first two phases of clinical trials.
The company will then proceed to the third stage of trials, which will determine whether the vaccine is effective among carriers of the virus. However, Sinovac is facing a problem for the third stage.
There are very few infections in China today to get enough volunteers to take the critical tests. The country has largely taken control of the coronavirus after imposing an unprecedented closure on downtown Wuhan and the surrounding Hubei Province.
Only about 600 people remain in the country's hospitals and new but few cases are reported every day. This means that Senovac may have to search for volunteers abroad.
"We are currently talking to several countries in Europe and Asia," says Sinovac's director of international affairs, Meng Wenning. He adds that it is usually necessary for several thousand people for the third stage, but "it is not easy to get these numbers in any country."
Even with success in the following stages, Sinovac will not be able to produce enough vaccines to treat the entire world population. But Meng says the company is ready to cooperate with foreign partners already buying other vaccines against influenza and hepatitis. As it continues to research, the company is preparing for its mass production phase.
Senovac is building a production facility in the south of the capital, which should be operational by the end of the year. "We work day and night, and we have three working groups on duty for 24 hours, and that means we don't waste any minute developing the vaccine," says Meng.
Warning:
As for the technical evaluation of the Chinese medicine, its problem is that it has not been tested on humans until now and when it reaches the third stage, which is experimenting with people at the beginning of the new year at the earliest, China will have difficulty trying it on infected Chinese because the preparation of the injured Chinese has begun to decline and it is You will not find anyone from outside countries who accepts to try it on healthy people first because the
results on healthy people do not mean that they are reliable and can be applied to infected people.
Nor can it be considered reliable if it is tested on scores or a limited number of injured people, and the extent of its success depends on the consent of states to test it on a large scale. If the experiment was limited to China, it would not be reliable.