Spain Set to Test Homegrown COVID Vaccine on Humans

MADRID (Reuters) – Spain’s medicines agency has authorized the first round of clinical trials for the COVID-19 vaccine developed by Spanish company Hipra, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said on Wednesday.

The early stage clinical trial will recruit dozens of participants from Spanish hospitals to test the drug’s safety and tolerability, as well as its immunogenicity and efficacy, the medicines agency said in a statement.

Hipra, which has manufacturing bases in Spain and Brazil, said it could produce up to 400 million doses in 2022 and 1.2 billion in 2023.

“Spain’s medicines and health products agency has just authorized clinical tests of the Spanish COVID vaccine on humans,” Sanchez told a news conference in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands.

Hipra, a pharmaceutical lab that mainly researches and manufactures veterinary vaccines, has been working on two COVID-19 shots.

One is based on the same RNA messenger technology used in Pfizer and Moderna’s shots and is being developed in collaboration with the Hospital Clinic of Barcelona. The second, dubbed HIPRA SARS-CoV-2, which has just received approval for trial, uses a recombinant protein like the vaccine from U.S.-based drugmaker Novavax and others currently in trials.

Click https://tmsnrt.rs/3lwr2Ak for a Reuters graphic on vaccines in development.

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