Advent Delivers Doses of COVID-19 Vaccine Candidate for University of Oxford Clinical Trial

Italian contract development and manufacturing organization Advent, an IRBM company that manufactures viral vectors, announced in a May 28, 2020 press release that it had manufactured its first batch of a novel COVID-19 vaccine candidate, ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 (now known as AZD1222), and delivered the first 4000 doses for use in the Phase 2/3 clinical trial COV002 by the University of Oxford, England.

In February 2020, IRBM’s Advent agreed to manufacture ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 for The Jenner Institute. The vaccine uses a non-replicating adenovirus vector with the addition of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein of the COVID-19 virus. Advent says it was able to manufacture its first batch of vaccine in just over one month from receiving the seed stock by rapidly devising a manufacturing process to produce 13,000 doses of the vaccine for use in Phase 2/3 clinical trials. The rapid and reliable development of a large-scale manufacturing process is a critical step, because Phase 1 trials are underway, the company noted in the release.

“Speed is of the essence when facing a new outbreak such as this unprecedented Covid-19 pandemic,” said Professor Sarah Gilbert of the Jenner Institute, in the press release. “Advent has manufactured and delivered the vaccine very quickly, producing a clinical batch in just over one month since we provided the seed stock, enabling us to rapidly prepare for larger scale clinical trials.”

The University of Oxford is partnering with AstraZeneca for the development and potential large-scale distribution of the vaccine candidate.

Source: Advent