China's SinoVac starts late stage trials for its COVID-19 vaccine

LONDON/BEIJING, July 6 (Reuters) - China's SinoVac
is starting Phase III trials of its potential coronavirus
vaccine, it said on Monday, becoming one of three companies to
move into the late stages in the race to develop an inoculation
against the disease.

It will start recruiting volunteers this month, it said in a
release published on China's WeChat messaging app platform. Last
week, Brazil gave the go-ahead for the company to start testing
volunteers in the country.

The World Health Organization's (WHO) latest document
released on Monday outlining the status of trials being
conducted around the globe said SinoVac's was now at Phase III.
https://bit.ly/2O1DiH7

AstraZeneca's experimental COVID-19 vaccine, which
was developed by researchers at the University of Oxford, and
Sinopharm are the only other candidates in late-stage
Phase III trials.

SinoVac is building a vaccine plant, which it hopes will be
ready this year and capable of making up to 100 million shots a
year.

Phase I and Phase II trials typically test the safety of a
drug before it enters Phase III trials that test its efficacy.

There are 19 vaccine trials in clinical evaluation and
hundreds being developed and tested around the world to stop the
COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed hundreds of thousands and
ravaged the global economy.

No COVID-19 vaccine has yet been approved for commercial
use. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology analysis last year
found that about one in three vaccines in the first stage of
testing later gains approval.

(Reporting by Josephine Mason in London and Roxanne Liu in
Beijing; Editing by David Clarke)