Canada clears world's first plant-based Covid vaccine

[TOKYO] The world's first plant-derived Covid-19 vaccine was cleared for use in Canada, creating a novel immunisation to combat the virus from a unit of Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings and Philip Morris International.

The vaccine named Covifenz was jointly developed by Medicago, a biopharma company owned by Mitsubishi Chemical and Philip Morris and based in Quebec City, and GlaxoSmithKline. It will be available for adults aged 18 to 64, Medicago and Glaxo said in a statement Thursday.

The approval gives people who are hesitant to take currently available vaccines made by Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Moderna another option. Many countries are struggling to raise vaccination rates and are requiring citizens to be immunised to get into restaurants, shopping malls trains and planes.

The company hopes Covifenz will generate about US$1 billion a year eventually, Mitsubishi Chemical's chief executive officer Jean-Marc Gilson said in an interview last week.

The vaccine is easier to transport and store than rival mRNA shots, such as those from Pfizer and Moderna, since it doesn't need to be kept at ultra-low temperatures, he said.

Covifenz is made from proteins, grown in plants, that look like the virus that causes Covid-19 to the human immune system, according to Medicago's website. The vaccine also uses Glaxo's pandemic adjuvant, a substance that boosts the immune system's response.

Medicago has a contract with the Canadian government to supply up to 76 million doses of the vaccine and is in talks with other countries about potential agreements, chief executive officer Takashi Nagao has said.

The immunisation was granted fast-track designation by the US Food and Drug Administration in February 2021.

The vaccine demonstrated 71 per cent efficacy against multiple variants of the virus in December, Medicago said. It was 75 per cent effective against the highly-infectious Delta variant and nearly 89 per cent effective against the Gamma variant first identified in Brazil. The Omicron variant wasn't circulating when the trial was conducted, and the company is planning future tests against that strain. BLOOMBERG