American biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong spent the past year at home, but he hasn’t been idle. This gave him time to find a way for Africa to produce its own vaccines.
ImmuntyBio, which he co-owns, signed an agreement with the BioVac Institute, a state-backed South African vaccine company, to manufacture coronavirus doses from scratch in the country.
It also provides an initial R3 billion ($214 million) to the country of his birth to pass on the generation of Covid-19 injections and other treatments that can be exported across the continent.
The origin of his project dates back almost half a century, when he left South Africa as a newly qualified doctor to gain the experience he planned to bring back some five years later.
Born in Port Elizabeth, a coastal city that recently changed the name Gqeberha, to Chinese-born parents, he studied in Johannesburg and at the University of British Columbia before moving to Los Angeles.
“I underestimated how long it would take,” Soon-Shiong, 68, said in an interview this week from his home in California. “But not only was I able to harvest the technology, I was also able to generate the technology. “
The intervening decades saw Soon-Shiong amass a fortune following his invention of the cancer drug Abraxane, and sold two for a total of $7. 4 billion.
His net worth is now $15. 3 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, and his assets come from the Los Angeles Times and a percentage of the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team, which bought former star player Magic Johnson.
Global inequalities
As the Covid-19 pandemic highlights many of the existing inequalities in fitness globally, the extent to which Africa has been left has become increasingly apparent.
While African countries have administered only about two-thirds of their vaccine stockpiles, less than 0. 5% of the continent’s 1. 3 billion people have been fully vaccinated.
At the same time, many developed countries are quite complex in their implementations and the United States is preparing to vaccinate schoolchildren despite calls for percentages above maximum doses.
This raises fears about the emergence of new, deadlier coronavirus variants which, in turn, may undermine the efficacy of the existing vaccine package.
There are fewer than 10 vaccine brands in Africa, founded in Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal and South Africa, and most of them are engaged in packaging and labeling than manufacturing.
“They’re so tired of standing in line,” Soon-Shiong said. You want your own autonomy to be able to control your own destiny. “
Soon-Shiong’s vision is to unite a coalition of donors, governments and corporations so that new vaccines are developed in Africa and can be manufactured in adequate quantities.
He expects to reveal the coalition’s main points in July and says he has spoken with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and Health Minister Zweli Mkhize, among others.
“I didn’t think it would ever happen, but it is,” said Glenda Gray, president of the South African Medical Research Council and co-director of a Johnson vaccine trial.
“I guess he needs to give something back. He’s a doctor, he trained in South Africa and he needs to do something worthwhile. “
Scale required
Soon-Shiong acknowledges that construction at the required scale may not take place overnight, but he also doesn’t think it will take another decade if it gains mandatory buy-in from local partners.
The entrepreneur has contacted Aspen Pharmacare, Africa’s largest drugmaker and maker of the J vaccine.
“There’s no question there’s a wonderful unmet need, now is the time to pool resources,” he said. “We have to go to places like the World Bank and the World Trade Organization and even entities in the United States to say it’s in their most productive interest to fund this. “
ImmunityBio’s hAd5 T-cell vaccine targets the nucleocapsid protein, which is less vulnerable to mutations, as well as spike proteins found in the coronavirus.
Phase 1 trials are underway in the U. S. The candidate is a booster in a study of nearly 500,000 South African fitness workers, according to Gray.
Vaccine capsule
The vaccine can be manufactured in capsule form, greatly easing the challenge of distributing doses in upcoming countries.
“We can become a number one vaccine and a booster, but I don’t care if we’re just the push because we need to inspire as many vaccines as possible” in South Africa, Soon-Shiong said.
This is even more so as covid-19 mutates and spreads. Last week, the African Union’s fitness firm suggested countries across the continent develop tests for the coronavirus as more countries report other variants of the disease.
Soon-Shiong’s company has been working on a map of covid-19 strains, which includes investigating some 300,000 mutations.
“Unfortunately, Covid is here to stay. I see Covid as a cancer and we have to face it with our eyes wide open,” he said. “The good news about Covid is that it has opened up clinical research to degrees never seen before. “
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