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| An SK Bioscience researcher handles vials. Courtesy of SK Bioscience |
By Baek Byung-yeul
SK Bioscience, which developed Korea's first COVID-19 vaccine, SKYCovione, said Thursday that the biotech company aims to address the issue of vaccine inequality by intensifying collaboration with international organizations so that people living in low-income countries will be easily able to prevent life-threatening diseases.
Rich, developed countries were the first to get access to sufficient doses of the COVID-19 vaccines to fully vaccinate the majority of their populations. However, whereas some developed countries purchase vaccines in numbers that exceed demand, eventually discarding them in large numbers after they expire, most of the population of the countries with the lowest per capita GDP continue to be unable to receive even a single dose.
According to "Our World in Data," a website compiling global COVID-19 statistics, 68 percent of the world's population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, but only 22.7 percent of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose.
To address the issue, SK Bioscience is trying to resolve the inequitable vaccine distribution with its SKYCovione vaccine.
"We have submitted an application to grant SKYCovione the World Health Organization's (WHO) emergency use listing status. Once the company is granted the WHO's emergency use listing status, SKYCovione will become available for global distribution through the WHO's COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access Facility," a company spokesman said.
The vaccine was developed jointly with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and the Institute for Protein Design (IPD) at the University of Washington, supported by funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI).
In June, SKYCovione won approvals for use from the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety to become Korea's first locally-developed COVID-19 vaccine.
The company conducted Phase 3 clinical trials on 4,037 adults aged over 18, in cooperation with 16 institutions, including Korea University Guro Hospital and the International Vaccine Institute (IVI), the vaccine induced neutralizing antibody responses against the parental strain.
The company said the neutralizing antibody titers ― or the level of antibodies in a blood sample ― increased about 33 times two weeks after the second dose. The proportion of participants who seroconverted or saw more than a fourfold increase in neutralizing antibody titers, was 98.06 percent, the company added.
"SKYCovione is a self-assembled nanoparticle vaccine targeting the receptor binding domain of the SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein for the parental SARS-CoV-2. To let more countries use our vaccine, we also have applied for conditional marketing approval with the UK's Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency and the European Medicines Agency," the official said.
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