Wayne Channon, the founder of a start-up company near Brighton, signed a deal this month with China’s National Academy of Science, to ramp up work to find an oral vaccine for the coronavirus.
Stabilitech’s agreement, for £3m, will accelerate research, development and ultimately manufacturing of his vaccine, which is 12 weeks away from being tested on healthy volunteers.
However, only China will benefit. Channon’s failure so far to win the backing of the UK government means that British families are likely to be at the back of the queue should his vaccine succeed.
“It’s great for China but they’re not going to ship it to the UK,” said Channon, who is also working on an oral vaccine for the Zika virus. “We need UK government funding for that.”
Channon’s story is echoed across the pharmaceutical industry. While British scientists are making great strides on vaccines — with institutes including Oxford University and Imperial College London involved in the research — there is not the capacity to make enough doses to cope with a pandemic.
Part of the problem is funding. A £67m cash injection for a vaccines plant at Oxford’s Harwell campus last summer fell short of the £90m scientists had hoped for. Even that facility will not be complete until 2022, too late for the current Covid-19 pandemic.
Sir John Bell, a government adviser and regius professor of medicine at Oxford University, questioned why ministers had not put up more funding for the project.
“It’s probably not quite big enough, and it’s not built yet,” said Bell, who also sits on the board of Roche, one of the biggest drugmakers. “For an extra £20m you could have got one that did what it needed to do.”
Boris Johnson has promised an extra £46m in the fight against the coronavirus, taking the total to £65m, but the industry will still face the challenge of mass- producing and distributing vaccines.
Britain’s failure to ensure it is able to make its own vaccines could prove critical in the months ahead. While millions of doses of flu vaccines are bought in from France, Belgium and the US each winter, the supply is planned months in advance, with the elderly and those most at risk vaccinated first.
There are concerns that drugmakers preparing to produce a vaccine for the coronavirus may not be able to meet demand, meaning countries with manufacturing plants could refuse to export to the UK.
“If you have a crisis, everybody pulls the shutters down,” said Bell. “Whatever you make you keep for the home team.”
Britain was not always so reliant on overseas suppliers. Until the late 1970s, vaccines were largely produced in their home markets. Burroughs-Wellcome and Glaxo, now GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), serviced British families.
However, that model has been abandoned in the past few decades and today even London-based GSK makes its vaccines in Belgium.
There are now just two vaccine makers in the UK — Seqirus and AstraZeneca, which both have small plants in Speke, on the edge of Liverpool. The UK will need far more capacity if it is to inoculate the nation.
Thomas Breuer, medical chief of GSK’s vaccines division, said the US commitment to vaccine research was attracting companies such as GSK. “The US government is very engaged and willing to put money on the table to have manufacturing sites for flu and other potential pandemics.”
Channon’s hopes now rest on the British government providing £3m to start testing his oral vaccine. “Whether it works is now the single most important thing,” he added.