A VACCINE developed in Spain against Covid has entered the second phase of clinical trials involving 1,000 volunteers.
Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said on Monday, November 15, that Spain’s medicines agency has granted authorisation to Catalonia-based pharmaceutical group Hipra to test a COVID-19 vaccine it is developing on more than 1,000 volunteers. The PM said that Hipra will carry out the so-called Phase II trial – the second stage of a three-round trial process – on volunteers at 10 hospitals across the country.
Speaking at an event to present how European Union recovery funds will be channelled into health investments, Sanchez described Hipra’s vaccine development as “extraordinary news. It demonstrates that Spain can position itself at the forefront of the response to COVID,” he said, adding that the government had given a €15 million grant to help develop the drug.
The HIPRA vaccine is not modelled on mRNA technology such at the Moderna and the Pfizer/BioNTech or the more traditional vaccine technologies that were used by the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson (Janssen) vaccines but uses recombinant protein technology instead.
An independent committee will monitor the volunteers for any possible adverse effects or cases of infections. The trial is expected to take months, but AEMPS has not outlined a specific timeframe. According to Hipra, it expects to have authorisation from the European Medicines Agency (EMA) by the first quarter of 2022.
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