China's Walvax says has most participants for large mRNA COVID vaccine trial

An official at Walvax Biotechnology said the Chinese company has recruited most of the 28,000 participants needed for a large clinical trial of its mRNA COVID-19 vaccine candidate, as reported in Yahoo!News.

From next week, a Phase III trial for Walvax' potential mRNA vaccine will shift its focus from recruiting participants to identifying potential COVID-19 infections for data analysis, Walvax's vice chairman Huang Zhen said.

He declined to provide any timeline for when the trial could establish the efficacy of the vaccine.

The ARCoV vaccine, which Walvax co-developed with Suzhou Abogen Biosciences and a Chinese military-backed research institution, is being tested in a Phase III trial across countries including China, Mexico and Indonesia.

Another China-based clinical trial to test ARCoV as a booster dose has recruited more than 1000 participants and collected blood samples for analysis, Huang said, without saying when the results could be ready.

Walvax has an annual capacity to make 200 million doses of the vaccine in the form of bulk substance, and the company intends to increase that capacity, Huang added.