MEXICO CITY (REUTERS) - Mexico aims to have developed a vaccine against Covid-19 that could be granted approval for emergency use by the end of this year, a senior official said on Tuesday (April 13).
Maria Elena Alvarez-Buylla, head of the National Council of Science and Technology (Conacyt), told a regular news conference that the vaccine under development known as "Patria" could be granted approval in November or December of this year.
Clinical trials with volunteers could begin this month, according to Avimex, the veterinary pharmaceutical company that is leading the vaccine's development in Mexico.
The company said it used existing technology from its veterinary influenza vaccine, which has been proven safe for humans, for an effective Covid-19 vaccine.
It is being developed with technology from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York and a HexaPro protein developed by the University of Texas at Austin.
"After analysing the technological platforms at its disposal, Avimex determined that a recombinant Newcastle disease virus (rNDV) has the potential for success for the Covid-19 vaccine," the company said in a statement shared with Reuters.
Mexico's foreign ministry and Conacyt contributed funding, Avimex said.
The company has arranged exclusive infrastructure to make the vaccine, it said, and plans "industrial scale production"after successful phase 1 and 2 trial results.
Mexico has so far received 16.9 million doses of vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech, Sinovac, AstraZeneca, CanSino and Sputnik V, according to government data.
