February 20, 2020
Sanofi Pasteur has joined Johnson & Johnson as the second firm to team up with BARDA to take on coronavirus (COVID-19).
According to a statement, Sanofi Pasteur will use recombinant DNA tech to make a vaccine against the virus that has sickened tens of thousands and resulted in hundreds of deaths since it emerged in China last year.
The plan is to use the Sanofi technology to reverse engineer proteins isolated from the virus to produce DNA sequences.
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These sequences will then be mass produced using Sanofi Pasteur’s baculoviral expression system and formulated into a vaccine that elicits an immune response.
The approach was developed for Flublok, a recombinant vaccine against influenza subtypes A and B.
Sanofi’s vaccines unit added the recombinant DNA tech and expression system to its arsenal when it acquired Protein Sciences in 2017.
Coronavirus efforts
Sanofi Pasteur plans to further investigate an advanced pre-clinical SARS vaccine candidate that could protect against COVID-19 according to David Loew, Global Head of Vaccines at Sanofi.