Coronavirus: China-made mRNA vaccine targets BA.4, BA.5 Omicron variants, set for UAE trials
- United Arab Emirates gives green light to clinical testing of Suzhou Abogen Biosciences jab aimed at prevalent strains
- The new vaccine’s redesigned mRNA sequence is effective against most of the Omicron variants, the company says
Another Chinese-made hi-tech Covid-19 vaccine candidate – this one targeting the prevalent BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron variants – has been approved for clinical trials in the United Arab Emirates.
Suzhou Abogen Biosciences now has four mRNA vaccines in development, with recruitment under way in the UAE and Indonesia for clinical trials of its two candidates aimed at Omicron’s BA.1 strain.
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Last month, Indonesian health regulators gave emergency use approval to Abogen’s first Covid-19 vaccine, developed using the same mRNA technology platform adopted by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.
China has yet to authorise any mRNA vaccine for emergency use although candidates by various developers have been approved for clinical trials in the past three years. BioNTech, which partnered with Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical in mainland China, has had its jab stuck in administrative review for a year.
Abogen said its latest candidate was an updated version of its earlier vaccine targeting the BA.1, with a redesigned mRNA sequence for the latest variants, which had also proved effective against most of the Omicron strains.
In a statement on Monday, the company said preclinical animal studies had shown the vaccine candidate induced broad immunity against Omicron’s sublineages. The data has not yet appeared in peer-reviewed publications.
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Abogen chief medical officer Zheng Hongxia said the company was moving rapidly to advance clinical trials for the new vaccine “to meet the needs of epidemic prevention and control as soon as possible”.
“The current global epidemic is still at a high level and the constant mutation of Sars-CoV-2 poses a great challenge for vaccine development. Vaccines using mRNA technology are one of the effective means to deal with virus mutations,” he said.
In its latest epidemiology report, the World Health Organization said the BA.5 lineage was dominant in mid-September, according to an open genome sequence database, followed by descendants of BA.4 and BA.2, respectively.
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BA.5 sublineages – including highly transmissible and immunity-evasive strains such as BF.7 – have already made it past China’s borders and caused outbreaks in several cities.
More than 90 per cent of the Chinese population have been vaccinated but only about 57 per cent have received one booster shot, mostly with a homegrown inactivated vaccine.
In the US and Europe, bivalent vaccines – based on two strains of the virus – targeting the original Omicron as well as its BA.4 and BA.5 variants have been approved for use.
