Providence-Biological E Covid-19 vaccine to undergo phase two trials this month
Brad Sorenson, CEO of Providence, told HT he was hopeful the first consignment of the vaccines, if approved, will start flowing to India from his company’s manufacturing unit in Manitoba province by the end of this year
A Canadian vaccine developer that announced a partnership with an Indian firm last week is hoping to start phase two trials for its Covid-19 vaccine this month.
Providence Therapeutics, headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, is confident that it will be able to send a shipment of the vaccine candidate PTX-COVID19-B to its Indian partner, Hyderabad-based Biological E, in July so that trials can start in India, too, prior to application for emergency-use authorisation from health authorities.
Brad Sorenson, CEO of Providence, told HT the company expects to soon submit some additional data requested by Health Canada.
“As soon as we have that, which it may be as early as next week, but I expect it’ll be within two weeks, we will submit that to Health Canada and we will proceed into our phase two trials,” Sorenson said.
Sorenson was hopeful that the first consignment of the vaccines, if approved, will start flowing to India from Providence’s manufacturing unit in the province of Manitoba by the end of this year.
“If everything goes well, we should have approval before the end of the year and we should have doses to begin distributing right away once approval comes in,” he said.
Providence will manufacture a batch of 30 million doses, with Biological E making between 600 million and a billion doses thereafter.
Half that capacity made in India will be retained by Biological E and the other half given to Providence for overseas sale.
Sorenson said Providence was exploring partnerships for manufacturing the vaccine so that high demand for a coronavirus vaccine could be met. “The nature of this deal is to make messenger RNA vaccines at very low cost,” he said.
Providence is also in discussions with the World Health Organization (WHO) for participation in the UN body’s “solidarity trials”, which it describes as “one of the largest international randomised trials for Covid-19 treatments, enrolling almost 12,000 patients in 500 hospital sites in over 30 countries”.
While acceptance is not guaranteed, Sorenson said he was confident Providence has “a world-class vaccine” and that the WHO is “very excited to have an mRNA vaccine of this calibre participating in the solidarity trial”.
Authorisation by the WHO will also open up the vaccine’s usage globally, and Sorenson was hopeful it would become part of the Covax global vaccine distribution facility.
Interestingly, Providence is working on another version of the vaccine, PTX-COVID19-LT, which is in its investigation phase.
Sorenson said the “immunity that would be generated would be longer lasting” so a booster dose wouldn’t necessarily be required every year.
“You might be able to get this shot and it might be good for five or ten years, and so it would be very effective for the entire world; and particularly for low and middle-income countries where rolling out vaccines on an annual basis is very prohibitive.”