AstraZeneca Plots Next Steps in Covid Effort With U.K. Lab
AstraZeneca Plots Next Steps in Covid Strategy With New U.K. Lab
(Bloomberg) -- AstraZeneca Plc will open labs for its Covid-19 products at a new U.K. research and development site this year as the drugmaker defends its vaccine’s effectiveness against doubts at home.
The labs, which will be based at the R&D hub in Cambridge, England opened Tuesday, will house a unit for vaccines and also focus on the company’s antibody cocktail, which is expected to receive U.S. and U.K. authorization in coming months.
The U.K. ordered 100 million doses of Astra’s vaccine last year, but ultimately limited its use to people over 40 after a very rare blood clotting side effect emerged. Britain is largely relying on vaccines from Pfizer Inc. and Moderna Inc. for its booster program, leaving Astra on the sidelines.
Astra Chief Executive Officer Pascal Soriot said in an interview with the BBC earlier on Tuesday that its vaccine could be the reason the U.K. is faring better with Covid hospitalizations than Europe. While the U.K. gave the Astra vaccine to the elderly, many European nations limited the use of the shot initially to younger people over questions related to its efficacy.
He cited the two-pronged immune reaction vaccines produce -- antibodies and T-cells -- and suggested that the slower-developing T-cell response could mean Astra’s shot is providing more durable immunity in the aged.
More Data
Still, he said more data is needed, a view echoed by scientists.
“More time is needed to develop more insights into the durability of all of these vaccines,” Soriot said in an interview with Bloomberg TV, when asked about his comments. “We can formulate hypotheses but essentially only clinical data will give us the answer.”
The U.K. has hardly escaped the ravages of Covid. Over the past month, Britain has recorded 1.17 million new Covid cases and 4,536 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University data. That compares with 983,000 cases and 4,333 deaths for Germany, which has a larger population.
Other commentators have pointed to different factors to explain the outbreak in Europe. German Health Minister Jens Spahn called Covid a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” Germany and neighboring Austria, where infections have surged in recent weeks, have lower vaccination rates than many other western European countries.
Mene Pangalos, Astra’s head of biomedical research, said in a Bloomberg interview he didn’t know if the U.K. was going to renew its contract for the vaccine with the company.
Still, the Astra shot, created with the University of Oxford, is playing a key role in low- and- middle-income countries due to the fact it’s easy to transport and store and the company has provided it at cost during the pandemic.
The drugmaker said this month it will shift to selling its shot on a for-profit basis, after selling it at cost up until now. Pangalos said Astra is starting to attract new orders from countries around the world.
The new labs have been in the works for about eight years. The 1 billion-pound ($1.3 billion) R&D facility is one of three key global research hubs leading its $7 billion-plus annual R&D investment. The other two are in Sweden and the U.S.
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