INDIA COVID-19 : development of five Covid-19 vaccine candidates,

 

Lifting patents

As demand outstrips supply, there have been calls for big pharmaceutical companies to lift the patents on their vaccines to allow them to be produced more widely.

Bollyky said to scale up global manufacturing of vaccines, however, what is really needed is the technology transfer.

 

"It's not just a matter of intellectual property. It's also the transfer of know-how," he said. "I don't think there's clear evidence that a waiver of an intellectual property is going to be the best way for that technology transfer to occur."

Waiving patents will not work in the same way for vaccines as it has for drugs, Bollyky said. For HIV drugs, for example, manufacturers were more or less able to reverse engineer them without much help from the original developer.

 

"It's very different for vaccines, where it's really a biological process as much as a product. It's hard to scale up manufacturing in this process for the original company, let alone another manufacturer trying to figure this out without assistance," he said. "It requires a lot of knowledge that's not part of the IP."

The deal between AstraZeneca and the Serum Institute of India is a successful example of such technology transfer, Bollyky said, where the licensing of IP happened voluntarily. "The question is what can we do to facilitate more deals like the one between AstraZeneca and the Serum Institute of India to have this transfer," he said.

 

 

 

Head, the researcher at the University of Southampton, sees the bigger issue as one of manufacturing capacity.

"There's not that many sites that are able to manufacture any of the approved vaccines at a large scale -- certainly not enough to cover the 8 billion population around the world," he said.

"Sharing intellectual property during the pandemic is something that should happen but that doesn't resolve the issues," he said. "Manufacturing vaccines is hard. It's hard to rapidly set up a new site with all the equipment, infrastructure, all the vaccine ingredients, with suitable staff to produce a large number of high quality vaccine products. That's tricky."

 

India's reduction in vaccine exports to COVAX and other countries while it battles its own crisis is understandable, Head said, but "obviously will have consequences for other countries, particularly those in the poorer parts of the world that have barely vaccinated any parts of their population yet. That will essentially sustain the pandemic for a bit longer than we'd hoped."

Head predicts disruptions to supply will continue for the next six to 12 months while demand remains sky-high and companies scramble to acquire limited ingredients and step up production.

Pursuing vaccine sovereignty

 

 

Against this backdrop, some countries are seeking diverse ways to get the vaccine doses they so desperately need.

Turkish Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said Wednesday that Turkey would experience difficulties in securing vaccines over the next two months. 

 

 s well as signing a deal for 50 million doses of Russia's Sputnik shot, the country will also begin producing it locally, Koca said in a recorded speech. And the country is also working to develop its own vaccine, with the most advanced candidate an inactive vaccine that is expected to begin phase 3 trial soon, according to the minister.

 

Cuba, too, is pursuing vaccine sovereignty, with the development of five Covid-19 vaccine candidates, two of which are in their final phase three trials. Long cut off from much of the rest of the world, it has experience in producing medicines that few other developing nations can match.

According to Head, increasing research and production capacity across the globe will be key to managing future pandemics. 

 

"In between pandemic times, we must learn lessons about improving infrastructure for research across low and lower-middle income settings," he said. "We need several large hubs, manufacturing sites across Africa and Southeast Asia and South America that are able to develop at large scale vaccines and diagnostics and therapeutics, and with the paperwork in place as well."

That paperwork, Head said, would ensure that the vaccines produced in such regional hubs go first to the countries in need there -- and prevent richer nations jumping the queue.