AstraZeneca will test combination of its covid vaccine and Russia's

AstraZeneca will test a combination of its coronavirus vaccine and Russia’s Sputnik V shot in the hopes it will make the UK firm’s jab more effective

• Russia’s sovereign wealth fund announced the coming trial on Friday and AstraZeneca confirmed it will explore combining different vaccines
• Both shots use adenoviruses, but are formulated differently 
• Russia’s studies found Sputnik V 92% effective, while AstraZeneca’s shot was only 70% effective and 90% effective in a trial arm that gave half-first doses 

AstraZeneca will start clinical trials to test a combination of its experimental COVID-19 vaccine with Russia’s Sputnik V shot aimed at boosting the efficacy of the British drugmaker’s vaccine, Russia’s sovereign wealth fund said on Friday.

Trials will start by the end of the year and Russia wants to jointly produce the new vaccine if it is proven to be effective, said the RDIF wealth fund, which has funded Sputnik V, named after the Soviet-era satellite that triggered the space race.

AstraZeneca, in a statement on Friday, said it was considering how it could assess combinations of different vaccines, and would soon begin exploring with Russia’s Gamaleya Institute, which developed Sputnik V, whether two common cold virus-based vaccines could be successfully combined.

Sputnik V is about 92 percent effective at preventing COVID-19, according to peer-reviewed trial data, but Western scientists and governments have remained skeptical of the shot. 

AstraZeneca’s vaccine performed more poorly overall, proving only 70 percent effective in trials, with the exception of an accidental arm of the trial in which participants got a half-strength first dose. 

The UK has asked its regulators to review AstraZeneca’s shot, developed by Oxford University, for emergency approval, and U.S. trials are slated to be completed in January 2021. Sputnik V is already being administered in Russia. 

AstraZeneca will trial a combination of its 70% effective coronavirus vaccine with Russia’s Sputnik V shot in the hopes the latter will boost the Oxford University-developed jab’s efficacy

AstraZeneca did not give further details about its plans for trials of its shot combined with Russia’s. However, its Russian arm said it would start to enrol adults aged 18 years and older for the trial.

The co-operation between one of Britain’s most valuable listed companies and the state-backed Russian science research institute highlights the pressure to develop an effective shot to fight the pandemic that has killed over 1.5 million people.

The move is likely to be seen in Moscow as a long-awaited vote of confidence by a Western manufacturer in Sputnik V.

Its Russian developers say clinical trials, still underway, have shown it has an efficacy rate of over 90 percent higher than AstraZeneca’s own vaccine and similar to U.S. rivals Pfizer and Moderna.

Some Western scientists have raised concerns about the speed at which Russia has worked, giving the regulatory go-ahead for its vaccines and launching large-scale vaccinations with Sputnik V before full trials to test its safety and efficacy have been completed. Russia has rejected such criticism as unfounded.

The prospective tie-up comes as AstraZeneca, once seen as a frontrunner in the vaccine race, prepares for further tests to confirm whether its shot could be 90% effective, potentially slowing its roll out.

The average efficacy rate was 70.4 In interim late-stage data.

RUSSIA FORGED THE VACCINE ALLIANCE WITH ASTRAZENECA OVER TWITTER

The partnership came about after the developers of Sputnik V suggested on Twitter last month that AstraZeneca try the combination after the British drugmaker released interim results from its late-stage trial.

The British drugmaker accepted the proposal, the RDIF said on Friday.

‘The decision by AstraZeneca to carry out clinical trials using one of two vectors of Sputnik V in order to increase its own vaccine´s efficacy is an important step towards uniting efforts in the fight against the pandemic,’ said RDIF head Kirill Dmitriev in a statement.

‘We hope that other vaccine producers will follow our example.’

Earlier this week, Kate Bingham, chair of Britain’s vaccine task force, said the country would start trials next year using combinations of different kinds of vaccine for the initial and booster vaccinations, in the hope that a ‘mix-and-match’ approach might maximise the immune response.

Both projects are using harmless adenoviruses as vehicles to bring genetic instructions into the body to prompt cells to produce vaccine proteins, an approach that has previously been used in an Ebola vaccine.

One common challenge of such a method is that the immune system could attack the adenovirus vehicle, known as the viral vector, and in particular neutralize the staggered booster shot that is now an important feature of the leading COVID-19 vaccine candidates.

Using different viral vectors for the primer and booster shot is one approach that researchers, including at the Gamaleya Institute, have pursued. 

Combining vaccines from different developers could also be a way around that.

AstraZeneca and partner Oxford University have used a harmless adenovirus only found in monkeys to rule out that people receiving the shot had previous exposure and therefore an immune defence against it.

AstraZeneca did not mention immunity against the viral vector as an issue in its statement on Friday.

Still, Russian officials have not always been complimentary about the British vaccine.

When the company paused a clinical trial in September due to the unexplained illness of a volunteer, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Sputnik V was a more reliable vaccine because it was based on an adenovirus found in humans, whereas the British candidate was ‘a monkey vaccine.’

The partnership may draw scrutiny after Britain said in July hackers backed by the Russian state were trying to steal COVID-19 vaccine and treatment research from academic and pharmaceutical institutions around the world. The Kremlin rejected the Western allegations.

The news came as Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline said clinical trials of their COVID-19 vaccine showed an insufficient immune response in older people.

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