A Confidentiality Disclosure Agreement (CDA) has been signed by the Task Group on Vaccine Evaluation and Selection with German company Curevac, Department of Science and Technology (DoST) Secretary Fortunato dela Pena said Friday.
In his weekly report, Dela Pena 12 CDAs hve been signed – Janssen, Sinovac Biotech, AstraZeneca, Gamaleya Research Institute, Sinopharm Group, Anhui Zhifei, University of Queensland, Adimmune Corp., Academia Sinica, Tianyuan Biopharma, Bharat Biotech, and CureVac.
He added that exploratory talks with German vaccine developers Curevac and IDT-Biologika were held last Jan. 11 and Jan. 13, respectively, to discuss possible avenues for vaccine cooperation.
Dela Pena disclosed that among the 25 vaccine developers working with the task group, 19 have expressed interest to conduct clinical trials in the Philippines.
The 25 vaccine developers are from 10 countries – six from China, six from the US, three from Chinese-Taipei, two from Russia, two from Australia, two from Germany, one from India, one from Japan, one from the United Kingdom, and one from Canada.
He added that these include vaccine developers that not only expressed interest to conduct clinical trials in the Philippines but also vaccine distribution and local manufacturing.
Dela Pena said that some of them have already made progress in their clinical application such as Janssen Pharmaceuticals from the United States which will hopefully conduct their clinical trials within this month.
Janssen Pharmaceuticals was the first vaccine developer to receive an approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to conduct clinical trials in the country last Dec. 28.
The task group also received an independent clinical trial application from Clover Biopharmaceuticals which was approved by the FDA last Jan. 8.
Sinovac has received clearance from the Vaccine Expert Panel and the Ethics Board. They have received approval from FDA last Jan. 15 and the conduct of their clinical trials in the country was announced three days later.
AstraZeneca has submitted their clinical trial application which was cleared by the VEP and the Ethics Board. However, they withdrew their application last Dec. 10 and are now applying for emergency use authority (EUA) with the FDA instead.
Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology, who developed the Russian Vaccine Sputnik V, withdrew their application for clinical trials in the Philippines last Jan. 6 but expressed their intent to apply for EUA with the FDA instead.