(Bloomberg) -- 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.
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.
For more, read: Are China’s Covid Shots Less Effective? Experts Size Up Sinovac
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.
A New Generation of Vaccines Is Coming, Some With No Needles
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.
For more, read: China’s Bid to Ramp Up Vaccinations Hindered by Supply Shortages
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.
