Chinese troops will be among the first to get jabs of one of China’s leading COVID-19 vaccine candidates, reports Fortune. The Chinese biotech firm CanSino Biologics is quoted as saying that China’s Central Military Commission gave the go-ahead for China’s military to inject soldiers with Ad5-nCoV, the company’s leading vaccine for a period of one year.
CanSino Biologics chair Yu Xuefeng said the vaccine candidate’s Phase 1 and II clinical trials demonstrated a “good safety profile” and high levels of immune response in patients. But he cautioned that the trials only show that the vaccine has the potential to prevent COVID-19 and that the military’s approval of the vaccine does not guarantee it will be authorized for broader commercial use in future.
CanSino Biologics has been developing the vaccine in conjunction with the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, a medical research institute run by the People’s Liberation Army. The two organisations are basing the experimental COVID-19 vaccine on their previous collaboration on an Ebola vaccine. The Chinese government approved the Ebola vaccine for widespread use in 2017.
CanSino Biologics Ad5-nCoV candidate has long been China’s leading COVID-19 vaccine candidate after it became the first in the world to begin clinical trials on 16 March. The company conducted Phase I and II trials in Wuhan, China, and published the in The Lancet.
In mid-May, CanSino, also announced a partnership with the National Research Council of Canada and got the green light to begin clinical trials with Canadian patients. The trials are being conducted over a six-month period in partnership with researchers at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Two other China-based COVID-19 vaccine projects – one developed by a state-owned Wuhan Institute of Biological Products and the other by Beijing-based biotech firm Sinovac – entered human testing earlier this year, making them some of the world’s most promising candidates.
[link url="https://fortune.com/2020/06/29/china-coronavirus-vaccine-military/"]Full Fortune report[/link]