On March 4, vaccination of 44,010 volunteers from 18 to 90 years old began. Phase III is being held in Havana, Cuba’s main COVID-19 hotspot. The regulator expects to receive the first results by mid-April, more accurate – in May. Another phase III branch is being carried out in the allied Cuba of Iran: 100,000 doses were sent to the local Pasteur Institute.
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Coronavirus enters cells by “anchoring” with spikes at receptors on its surface. The region of the spine that grabs onto the receptor is called RBD. If a vaccine is made from RBD alone, it may elicit an insufficiently strong immune response.
The Cubans decided to “stitch” a large protein molecule of tetanus toxoid, a strong irritant, with several synthetic RBDs of the coronavirus. This design caused, according to them, the strongest immune response:
In conjugated vaccines, those pathogen regions / fragments that are irritants to the immune system are chemically bound to other “carrier” components to increase the strength of the immune response, which are usually much more noticeable for the body’s defense systems. This technology, quite simple, created vaccines against pneumococcus, meningococcus, hemophilus influenzae Hib and others.
The developers write that their vaccine is stable for a long time at 2-8 ° C and is easy to produce in large volumes. The immunization schedule is two doses with an interval of 14 days. It has been pre-ordered so far mainly in countries with friendly regimes like Iran, Venezuela and others. There is also interest from Vietnam, Mexico, China, Pakistan, India and Africa.
In the West, these developments are treated with a certain degree of mistrust due to the delay or lack of detailed reports on the creation of the drug and its trials: these are about the same problems that sometimes accompany products, for example, from China or Russia. What will be the credibility of a vaccine tested only in Cuba and Iran is an open question.
Soberana 02 has only brief reports of the preclinical and phase I stages so far. According to Aureliano Stinga, a molecular biologist at the University of Geneva who oversees vaccine development around the world, “at some point all the data will have to be published. If Cubans are.” are drawing numbers “we’ll figure it out soon, since there won’t be any data,” he told BioWorld.
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