A very good news for scientific development on the island. Iran and Cuba will produce millions of doses of a vaccine against COVID-19, developed by the Finlay Vaccine Institute in Havana.

Starting next week, Iran and Cuba will produce millions of doses of a vaccine against COVID-19, developed by the Finlay Institute of Vaccines in Havana, according to its general director, Doctor Vicente Vérez Bencomo, in an interview given to a Persian press media.

Prensa Latina reported the interview given by the scientist to Hispantv channel, in which he announced that both nations are using all the knowledge and platforms within their reach to produce PastuCovac, as the Soberana 02 antidote would be called in Iran, which would be the world's first conjugated vaccine against COVID-19.

Vérez Bencomo and Dr. Alireza Biglarí, top executive of Iran's Pasteur Institute, held a press conference on Tuesday in Tehran in which they gave details of the scientific and technological collaboration, and which followed other activities of the Cuban researcher in that country that included a meeting with Foreign Minister Mohamad Yavad Zarif and another one with Dr. Said Namaki, Minister of Health.

The Finlay Institute has a lot of experience in the production of conjugated vaccines for children, so we decided to use this platform to build a vaccine against COVID-19, Vérez Bencomo explained.

This does not mean that other countries do not have this capability," he said, "but Iran and Cuba were the first countries to develop a conjugate vaccine against COVID-19 about a year ago, which is in the final stages of the third phase of a clinical trial.

This co-production, called Soberana 02 or PastuCovac, meets all its expectations, including prevention of infections and production of antibodies in the cell, and is effective against mutations of the virus, he said.

"It takes 15 years to develop a vaccine from zero to the industrialization stage, but we did all the steps in one year, and the evidence shows that it works very well," he stressed.

In this regard, he stated that they are currently in the industrial stage and are expected to start producing millions of doses of the vaccine next week.

There was already a long-standing collaboration between the two institutes in the production of the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine and the transfer of this technology to Iran, so the scientist stressed that thanks to this previous cooperation, both countries were able to move quickly to achieve work on the manufacture of the new vial.

Source: Cubadebate (With information from ACN and Prensa Latina)