U.K. Set to Pay £500 Million For GSK-Sanofi COVID-19 Drug

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Written by Martin Lynch, European News Editor for Industrial Info (Galway, Ireland)--The U.K. government is close to inking a £500 million ($624 million) deal with GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE:GSK) (GSK) (Brentford, England) and Sanofi (NASDAQ:SNY) (Paris, France) to supply the country with up to 60 million doses of their coronavirus vaccine.

The forthcoming deal comes at a time when countries around the world are scrambling to secure large quantities of early candidate drugs to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the Sunday Times, the U.K's business department is set to pay for the untested vaccine in stages as it passes through the testing phase. Human trials are expected to begin in September. The government refused to comment on exactly where the talks are, stating: [The U.K. is] "engaging with a wide range of companies both in the U.K. and abroad to negotiate access to vaccines. Appropriate announcements of these arrangements will be made as and when agreements with any of these companies are finalized and signed."

GSK and Sanofi announced their partnership to develop a COVID-19 vaccine in April. Sanofi is contributing its S-protein COVID-19 antigen, which is based on recombinant DNA technology, and which has produced an exact genetic match to proteins found on the surface of the virus, and the DNA sequence encoding this antigen has been combined into the DNA of the baculovirus expression platform, the basis of Sanofi's licensed recombinant influenza product in the U.S. GSK will contribute its own pandemic adjuvant technology. Sanofi stated that it can produce up to 1 billion doses a year.

In early July, Industrial Info reported that Sanofi is planning to invest 610 million euro ($689 million) to create a new production site and research and development centre in France with both dedicated to vaccines. The money is divided into 490 million euro ($553 million) to be spent over a five-year period to construct its Evolutive Vaccine Facility (EVF) in Neuville sur Saône, described as a "state-of-the-art industrial site to utilise the latest innovative vaccine production technologies" and a further 120 million euro ($135 million) to build a new R&D centre at the Sanofi Pasteur site in Marcy-l'Etoile to develop future vaccines. For additional information, see July 1, 2020, article--Sanofi Investing Big in New French Vaccine Plants.

The proposed U.K. deal comes just weeks after the U.S. government snapped up most of the world's supply of Remdesivir, an antiviral treatment made by Gilead. It is the first drug to date that can help people recover faster from COVID-19 and the first drug approved by U.S. licensing authorities. The Trump administration has bought 500,000 doses, most of the company's supplies for the next three months.

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