The Russian sovereign wealth fund says that one of its portfolio companies is working on a vaccine ... [+]
Moving right along; Russia, too, is in “warp speed” and pressing ahead with its human trials for a coronavirus disease vaccine. The country plans to produce 30 million doses of a Covid-19 vaccine domestically this year, Reuters reported from Moscow on Thursday.
The goal is to ultimately manufacture around 170 million for use outside of Russia.
Russian drug trials tend to be faster than U.S. drug trials, though with President Trump pushing for his so-called “warp speed” Covid-19 drug testing, the speed in which a vaccine is seen coming to market here is faster than it would be otherwise.
Around two dozen people completed early phase testing earlier this month in Russia, all developing SARS 2 coronavirus antibodies. The next phase starts August 2 with around 100 test patients. The final phase will test “several thousand people” in August barring a poor showing in the phase two trial, Russian Direct Investment Fund head Kirill Dmitriev told Reuters. At least one of the Fund’s portfolio companies is working on the vaccine.
“We believe that based on the current results it will be approved in Russia in August and in some other countries in September,” he says, highlighting Middle Eastern nations as the first foreigners to get a dose of the Russian vaccine. If Dmitriev is correct, Russia would likely be first to market with a Covid-19 vaccine.
Russia also reached a deal with AstraZeneca on a vaccine, currently dubbed AZD1222.
Russian Direct Investment Fund CEO Kirill Dmitriev is hopeful that his country will have a vaccine ... [+]
The Reuters article did not say which portfolio company was working on the vaccine, but the Fund told me that the two companies they invest in that are working on vaccines are R-Pharm and Alium.
The Russian Direct Investment Fund is the Russian sovereign wealth fund. They have invested around 180 billion rubles in national companies, of which the majority of the capital is raised from the private sector, bringing the total to more than 1.9 trillion rubles, or around $30 billion.
The Fund also has investments in ChemRar Group, which is the drug maker behind Avifavir - the first therapeutic registered in Russia that has been used against Covid-19 in clinical trials.
Avifavir is one of the two registered Covid-19 drugs in the world and the first Favipiravir-based drug approved for treatment of Covid-19.
The Russian sovereign wealth fund managers joined forces with Japan’s K.K. Mirai Genomics in May where the Fund invested in the production and distribution of the Russian-Japanese diagnostic system called Evotech-Mirai Genomics, a lab diagnostic machine that can detect coronavirus in roughly a half hour. The Japan Bank for International Cooperation is also behind that project.
Russia trails the U.S. and Brazil as the third hardest hit by the coronavirus, first found in China in December 2019. The world has been dealing with this for more than half of the year now, with no end in sight.
More than 100 possible vaccines are being tested worldwide. At least two are in their final phase of human trials with China’s Sinopharm and the AstraZeneca/University of Oxford drug leading the way. Over 3,000 people in Brazil will be injected with the Oxford vaccine in a trial run that started late last month and was funded in part by the Lemann Foundation. That Foundation was funded and created by Forbes-listed billionaire Jorge Paulo Lemann and his family.
The world is racing for a vaccine in order to return to normal as the economies of the world crater and survive on stimulus.
“I have never seen such global partnership and coordination for the development of a vaccine,” says Hans Kluge, regional director of Europe for the World Health Organization. Kluge was speaking today during a B20 conference call. B20 is the Saudi Arabia-based entity that coordinates business leaders and G20 leaders to tackle issues related to the global economy.
“My concern isn’t when and where the vaccine comes from, but will there be equal access to the vaccine?” says Kluge.
AstraZeneca has committed to supply 300 million vaccines worldwide.
“We get that every nation has to be committed to their own country, but the big lesson of Covid is that no one is safe until everyone is safe,” Kluge warned.
