Pharmaceutical Business review

Texas Children’s Hospital to launch protein sub-unit Covid-19 vaccine

The vaccine antigen’s initial construct was developed at CVD. Credit: Diverse Stock Photos / Flickr.

The move comes after the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) granted emergency use authorization (EUA) for the vaccine, dubbed ‘The World’s COVID-19 Vaccine’.

Corbevax technology was engineered and created at the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development (CVD).

The vaccine antigen’s initial construct and production process was also developed at CVD.

A traditional recombinant protein-based technology is used in the vaccine which enables the production at large scales making it widely accessible to the worldwide population.

After completion of two Phase III clinical studies conducted on more than 3000 participants, Corbevax was found to be safe, well tolerated, and immunogenic.

When assessed for neutralising antibody (nAb) geometric mean titers (GMT) against the Ancestral-Wuhan strain and Delta variant, the vaccine showed superior immune response compared to Covishield vaccine.

Corbevax also showed high persistence of immune response in the Phase II studies.

Texas Children’s Hospital CVD co-director and Baylor National School of Tropical Medicine professor and associate dean Dr Maria Elena Bottazzi said: “Protein-based vaccines have been widely used to prevent many other diseases, have proven safety records, and use economies of scale to achieve low-cost scalability across the world.

“Our decade-long studies advancing coronavirus vaccine prototypes has led to the creation of this vaccine, which will fill the access gap created by the more expensive, newer vaccine technologies and that today are still not able to be quickly scaled for global production.”