Recombinant COVID-19 Vaccine (CHO Cell) Academic Seminar Successfully Held

Recently, the “Academic Seminar on the Recombinant COVID-19 Vaccine (CHO Cell)” was successfully held virtually at the Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IMCAS), Chongqing Zhifei Biological Products Co., Ltd. (“Zhifei” or “the Company”), Anhui Zhifei Longcom Biopharmaceutical Co., Ltd. (Zhifei Longcom). The seminar was attended by Academician Dr. George Fu Gao, director of IMCAS Key Laboratory of Pathogenic Microbiology and Immunology and members from IMCAS, as well as over 30 attendees from the management team of Zhifei and Zhifei Longcom. 

In his speech at the seminar, Academician Dr. George Fu Gao said that in the pandemic situation, strategic thinking and tactical focus should be maintained, the research institute and enterprises should collaborate with each other to give full play to the advantages of all parties, to race against the virus and beat it to seek answers from science.

Qian Wei, director of IMCAS, first congratulated IMCAS and Zhifei on the achievements of the program, then he thanked everyone for making unremitting efforts, and expressed his expectations of further collaboration between both sides, to combine the intellectual achievements of IMCAS with the production capacity and research and development capacity of Zhifei to contribute to the prevention and treatment of emerging infectious diseases.

Jiang Rensheng, chairman of the Company, thanked IMCAS and all parties for their help in the realization of the development and marketing of the Recombinant COVID-19 Vaccine (CHO Cell). He emphasized that thanks to IMCAS’s full input, the mutual support and collaboration of the R&D team and the production team as well as the unremitting efforts and hard work of all staff, the vaccine is able to be the first recombinant protein vaccine approved for emergency use in the world. He said that Phase III clinical data show good safety and immunity of the vaccine, which is expected to make a great contribution to epidemic prevention and control at home and abroad. Meanwhile, he expressed his expectations of deepening consensus and strengthening cooperation with IMACAS, creating new achievements in multi-category and multi-field research and development.

During the subject report session, Prof. Dai Lianpan, researcher from IMCAS, and Yang Shilong, researcher from Zhifei made wonderful academic reports, respectively. Prof. Dai Lianpan further explained the design strategy of the Recombinant COVID-19 vaccine (CHO Cell), whose antigen is a structurally designed S-protein receptor-binding domain (RBD) dimer with a unique structure that does not carry any form of exogenous tags, which is able to significantly improve the immunogenicity of the vaccine and, at the same time, a second-generation vaccine developed against the variants i.e., chimeric RBD dimers provide superior protection against Beta variant challenge than prototype homotypic RBD dimers. The current Phase III clinical trial progress of the Recombinant COVID-19 vaccine (CHO Cell) and the results of the clinical trial were reported by Researcher Yang Shilong, who shared the ideas for follow-up research and development, and further introduced the progress of other key vaccines in our pipeline.

Subsequently, progress on the current work and the next-step strategies for collaboration and development in heterologous immunization, design of variant-target vaccine studies, and ect. was exchanged during the meeting.

Since December 12, 2020, the Recombinant COVID-19 vaccine (CHO Cell), jointly developed by IMCAS and Zhifei Longcom, has successively launched its international Multi-Regional Phase III clinical trial in China (Hunan Province), Uzbekistan, Indonesia, Pakistan and Ecuador.

On August 27, 2021, the Phase III clinical data of the vaccine was unblinded: the vaccine efficacy against COVID-19 of any severity was 81.43%. The efficacy against severe and above COVID-19 cases reached 92.87%, and death cases was 100%. The efficacy against Alpha and Delta variant were 92.88% and 84.82%, respectively, and it had good safety profile and disease prevention effect in patients included in Per Protocol Set (PPS).