GSK will price vaccine responsibly: Emmanuel Hanon, R&D Head

Mumbai: GSK said it was not expecting to profit from its collaborations on a vaccine candidate during the pandemic as the company rushes to offer 1 billion doses by next year. “We will responsibly price our adjuvant system and make it available to the poorest countries including through donations,” said Emmanuel Hanon, head of R&D, GSK Vaccines, in an online press conference on Wednesday. The company added that any short-term profit it generates from sales during the pandemic will be invested to support global long-term pandemic preparedness - either through GSK internal investments or with external partners.

GSK, along with French vaccine maker Sanofi, is working on a Covid-19 vaccine that would combine the recombinant DNA technology and GSK’s adjuvant tech platform that would help in mass production of dosages with fewer doses of vaccine proteins. However, what the company is worried about is the time line. “The classical time line for a vaccine development is 10-20 years. The long process includes the investigation and development phases to check efficacy and then manufacturing them,” said Hanon.

“The 15-18 months' time frame that we are looking for Covid is really stretching it,” he added. The challenge for developing a vaccine for a disease like Covid is that scientists are still not able to get a grasp of the virus. For illnesses like influenza there is some idea on how the disease works, but because of uncertainty surrounding Covid-19, the development is also a challenge, the company said.

This is the reason why GSK decided to stick with its adjuvant platform where it understands the efficacy and safety profile of the platform. The adjuvant platform helps in producing wide-scale vaccines by using limited antigen, the official added. “In our portfolio, we could have taken the approach that other companies did with the new vaccine platform, but we made a different choice, taking into consideration the portfolio that we have.”