Shanghai Government "COVID-19 Vaccine Clinical Trial in Mid-April"

[Asia Economy Beijing=Special Correspondent Park Sun-mi] Progress is being made in the development of COVID-19 vaccines in China. The Shanghai municipal government announced that the COVID-19 vaccine will enter clinical trials in mid-April and predicted that the vaccine could be commercialized by this winter.

According to the Global Times on the 17th, Shanghai reported progress in developing a COVID-19 vaccine using messenger RNA (mRNA), stating that animal testing of the vaccine has already begun and clinical trials could start by mid-next month. Separately, the city government also revealed progress in developing a VLP (Virus Like Particles) vaccine that produces specific antibodies in mice.

The commercialization of the COVID-19 vaccine is expected to be possible as early as this winter. Professor Yang Zanchu, a biologist at Wuhan University in China, explained, "Many countries have not yet entered the animal testing phase of the COVID-19 vaccine, but China is making significant progress. Animal testing takes about three months, and if effectiveness is proven, the general public could use the vaccine as early as this winter."

Among Chinese researchers, there are also claims that antibodies against COVID-19 have been confirmed in experiments on monkeys, raising expectations for the vaccine's effectiveness.

According to Hong Kong's South China Morning Post (SCMP), a research team led by Qin Chuan, director of the Medical Experimental Animal Research Institute at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, recently published a paper on the biology preprint platform bioRxiv, claiming that immunity was confirmed in monkeys who recovered from COVID-19 infection.

The research team stated that monkeys infected with COVID-19 through virus injection showed no symptoms of infection even after being re-injected with the virus once they had recovered, and rather, very high levels of antibodies were observed.

These results are significant in that they can alleviate concerns that the vaccine’s infection prevention effect might be reduced due to cases of COVID-19 patients being reinfected after discharge. Based on primate experiments, the researchers explained that some discharged patients testing positive again for COVID-19 may not be due to reinfection but could be caused by other factors such as false-negative diagnosis results.