How China Passed Up a
Vaccine Opportunity and Fell Behind
By Bruce Einhorn
April 14, 2021, 5:00 PM GMT+1 Updated on April 15, 2021,
8:49 AM GMT+1
The call came early in the Covid-19 pandemic. Drew Weissman,
an infectious diseases professor at the University of Pennsylvania and an
expert in messenger RNA, received a query from a Chinese company interested in
using the new technology to make a vaccine against the coronavirus.
mRNA, which
effectively turns the body’s cells into tiny vaccine-making factories, has
since become the breakout star of the Covid era, underpinning shots made by
Moderna Inc. and the Pfizer Inc./BioNTech SE partnership which have been among
the most effective in fighting the disease. Before Covid hit, though, the
experimental science had yet to receive regulatory approval for use against any
illness -- let alone against the mysterious respiratory infection.
“They wanted to develop my technology in their company in
China,” said Weissman, a leader in the field because of his work with research
partner Katalin Karikó on discovering mRNA’s disease-fighting potential. “I
told them I was interested.”
Then, nothing happened.
“I never heard from them again,” Weissman said.
It was one of the missed opportunities that have
disadvantaged the country’s Covid vaccine push and left Chinese companies
playing catch-up on a technology set to revolutionize everything from flu shots
to oncology drugs.
As the coronavirus spread globally last year, New York-based
Pfizer raced to partner with Germany’s BioNTech, an mRNA frontrunner that had
hired Kariko as a senior vice president. Massachusetts-based Moderna,
meanwhile, had $2.5 billion in funding from the U.S. government.
China Setback
By contrast, several Chinese companies focused on older
technologies that have proved far less potent. At a conference on April 10, the
head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, George Fu Gao,
said Chinese vaccines “don’t have very high protection rates,” local media
reported.
As the comments caused a stir on social media, Gao
backtracked, telling Communist Party-backed newspaper Global Times that he was
just referring to ways to improve vaccine efficiency. But no amount of damage
control can obscure the fact that no Made-in-China mRNA vaccines have been
approved yet.
That’s a setback for President Xi Jinping’s ambition to make
the country a healthcare innovation powerhouse. mRNA’s effectiveness with Covid
vaccines is opening up a new frontier for the technology, with researchers
looking at ways to use it to fight cancer, tuberculosis and many other
diseases, according to Surbhi Gupta, a healthcare and life sciences analyst
with consultancy Frost & Sullivan.
“mRNA technology has the potential to be a game changer,”
she said.
For decades, vaccines have been made using inactive versions
of viruses, but mRNA shots use genetic material to instruct the body to
create the spike protein the coronavirus uses to enter cells. That in turn
trains the body to fight potential infection.
Old-school Chinese-made Covid vaccines now in use from
Sinovac Biotech Ltd. and China National Biotec Group Co. rely on particles from
inactivated viruses and have protection rates much lower than the mRNA
vaccines’ more than 90% effectiveness in preventing infections.
Sinovac’s vaccine has an efficacy rate of a little over 50%
in protecting against symptomatic Covid-19, according to studies conducted in
Brazil, just meeting the minimum threshold required by global drug regulators.
State-owned China National Biotec, a unit of Sinopharm Group
Co., has said its two inactivated vaccines are 73% and 79% effective in
preventing symptomatic Covid but has not published data to support that
assertion. Sinopharm’s Hong Kong-listed shares jumped on Thursday, a day after
the company said that there had been no severe side effects related to its
inactivated-virus vaccines.
Meanwhile, China’s
CanSino Biologics Inc. has produced a viral-vector vaccine which, like
those made by AstraZeneca Plc’s and Johnson & Johnson, uses a
genetically modified virus to fight off infection. The Tianjin-based company
has reported 66% efficacy in preventing symptomatic Covid-19 in
its final stage trial.
China’s government has pushed aggressively to close the gap
with the West and become an alternative pharmaceutical and biotech power. It
allowed controversial treatments with stem cells and gene therapy, despite
concerns elsewhere about safety and efficacy. Yet China didn’t make mRNA
vaccines a priority.
“Before Covid, a lot of people still had reservations” about
the technology, said Lusong Luo, senior vice president at BeiGene Ltd., a
Beijing-based biotech pioneer and leading producer of oncology drugs. “It’s
new, it’s at the cutting edge.”
When Sinovac began working on a vaccine, it focused on a
familiar method in order to develop a shot quickly, after efforts at exploring
other alternatives didn’t yield promising results.
“For us the strategy is really to use the more mature
platform and technology to solve the problem,” CEO Yin Weidong told Bloomberg
News in an interview last May.
Now, with the success seen by Pfizer and Moderna, Chinese
companies are jumping into the fray -- but their efforts will take time to pay
off. China may not have mRNA vaccines
until the end of 2021, according to Feng Duojia, president of the China
Association of Vaccines, China Global Television Network reported on April 11.
BeiGene in January announced an agreement to cooperate with
Strand Therapeutics Inc. of Cambridge, Massachusetts on an mRNA treatment for
tumors. “Now people realize that mRNA vaccines really work, it will be a lot
easier,” Luo said.
China’s Walvax Biotechnology Co. began construction in
December on a facility to make mRNA vaccines, while CanSino struck a deal in
May last year with Vancouver-based Precision NanoSystems Inc. to develop an
mRNA vaccine. Contract manufacturer WuXi Biologics Cayman Inc. has said it is
devoting over $100 million to mRNA-related vaccines, biologics discovery,
development and manufacturing.
While China has largely contained the spread of the
coronavirus within its borders, more effective vaccinations and a wider take-up
among its population would enable the country to reopen sooner, reducing the
need for quarantines and lockdowns. China risks losing the edge gained by
stamping out the virus if its inoculation drive is less effective than places
where mRNA shots are the backbone of rollouts.
In Israel, where nearly 60% of the population has received
the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, Covid cases, hospitalizations and deaths are
plunging. As more adults get their shots in the U.S., which also relies largely
on mRNA vaccines, President Joe Biden has predicted Americans will be
celebrating July 4th with backyard barbecues once again.
China isn’t the only country that missed the boat with mRNA.
While companies in Japan, India and Australia are significant players in
fighting diseases like flu and polio, no company in the Asia-Pacific region now
makes mRNA shots. “Basically, mRNA was put
in the ‘too-hard’ basket for many years,” said Nigel McMillan, Program
Director for Infectious Diseases & Immunology at Griffith University in
Southport, Australia.
In March this year, Takeda
Pharmaceutical Co., Moderna’s local partner for Japanese trials of
its Covid vaccine, signed a deal with New Jersey-based Anima Biotech on mRNA
treatments for Huntington’s and other neurological diseases. Another big
Japanese drug maker, Daiichi Sankyo Co., announced on March 22 the start of an
early-stage trial of its own mRNA Covid vaccine.
In Thailand, Bangkok-based Chulalongkorn University has
enlisted Penn’s mRNA pioneer Weissman to help it develop mRNA capability.
As they try to catch up, Chinese developers and others in
Asia can take advantage of the lower barriers to entry for mRNA vaccine and
drug development. In addition to the market leaders Moderna and BioNTech, there
are other Western startups that invested
in mRNA and are ready to license their technology.
Making mRNA vaccines and drugs also doesn’t require large
capital expenditures on expensive bioreactors and other equipment, said Archa
Fox, an associate Professor at the University of Western Australia’s School of
Human Sciences and School of Molecular Sciences.
That bodes well for China’s ability to recover from not
focusing on mRNA sooner, according to Weissman.
“They are going to hire the best scientists they can find,”
he said. “Anybody can get in the game if they’ve got good people and money.”
— With assistance by Dong Lyu
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