AstraZeneca takes COVID-19 vaccine to China with BioKangtai deal

We pointed out last week that China was a notable missing element in AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine strategy, despite being the drugmaker’s second-largest market. That has changed.

AstraZeneca reached a licensing deal with Chinese firm BioKangtai to help provide its adenovirus vector-based COVID-19 vaccine candidate, created by the University of Oxford, to China, AstraZeneca said (Chinese) in a social media post on Thursday. The pair will also explore the possibility of producing the vaccine for other markets.

Under the pact, AZ grants exclusive clinical development, production and commercialization rights to the vaccine in China to BioKangtai, which will in return reserve enough capacity to make at least 100 million doses of the shot by the end of 2020 and expand to 200 million doses per year by the end of 2021. Financial terms were not disclosed.

AZ’s aiming to produce 2 billion doses of the vaccine, dubbed AZD1222, worldwide by the end of 2021. Before the BioKangtai tie-up, it promised to provide the U.S. 300 million doses, the EU 300 million doses, the U.K. 100 million doses, plus up to 100 million doses in Brazil.

It signed a manufacturing and distribution agreement with R-Pharm in Russia and tapped the Serum Institute of India to provide for low-income countries. South Korea’s SK Bioscience recently joined AZ’s COVID-19 vaccine manufacturing network, and Daiichi Sankyo stated in late June that it’s in discussions to supply the shot in Japan.

AZ holds a much larger stake in China compared with its Big Pharma peers. The country is its second-largest market, behind the U.S., accounting for about a fifth of the British drugmaker’s business.