By Anthony Esposito and Adriana Barrera
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexico is applying to produce its own COVID-19 vaccines and could have a loan until next spring, according to a researcher coordinating local efforts as a component of a global race to tame a disease that has inflamed more than 26.75.millions of other people around the world.
Esther Orozco, coordinator of the panel representing Mexico in the Coalition for Innovations in Epidemic Preparedness, said the virus that transmits Newcastle avian disease is the most viable candidate to produce the first vaccine in Mexico.
Orozco said the vaccine, developed through the personal corporate Avimex Laboratory with researchers from Mexico’s main public university, UNAM, and the Mexican Social Security Institute, is in a position to begin the first phase of human testing.
“They are advanced,” Orozco told Reuters in an interview. “I think it will be in a position in the spring or early summer.”
He said Avimex vaccine trials would begin with “dozens of humans.”A time when “hundreds of patients” will be seen before thousands of volunteers participate in the latest Phase 3 studies.
Avimex, committed to the manufacture of vaccines and animal pharmaceuticals, did not respond to a request for comment.
Mexico has made a global effort to build diplomatic and industry partnerships to receive the approximately two hundred million doses of vaccine it estimates it wants for a disease that has inflamed more than 623,000 people and killed at least 66851 in Latin America’s second-largest economy..
Mexico will participate in clinical trials of Italian and Russian vaccines and has also reached an agreement to produce the vaccine with pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca Plc.
In addition, it plans to participate in phase 3 trials with French drug maker Sanofi, Johnson’s unit in Janssen.
Orozco said the Mexican vaccine will arrive “later” than major foreign candidates, but noted that another 7.5 billion people around the world will want to be vaccinated and that the number of vaccines could be double that amount if two doses are desired.
“The world will want a lot more than one vaccine,” he said.”We hope that Mexico will be a part of it, even if we are the first to cross the final line.”
(Report through Anthony Esposito and Adriana Barrera; Edited through Drazen Jorgic and Dan Grebler)