Cuba seeks to produce millions of doses of a vaccine candidate

Havana, February 22 (RHC)--Cuba's biopharmaceutical industry is working to achieve a productive scale-up of millions of doses of its Soberana 02 vaccine candidate, the most advanced against Covid-19, local press reported on Sunday.

The deputy director of Industrial Operations of the Finlay Vaccine Institute, Roselyn Martinez, told national TV that hundreds of thousands of vials of the Cuban prototype have already been produced to start its phase III clinical trials next March.

"We have managed in record time to align all the technological analyses, requirements, capacities to obtain the active pharmaceutical ingredients that make up the vaccine formulation to the industrial scale-up volumes," she pointed out.

Soberana 02 is produced on a large scale at Biocen's parenteral plant, which belongs to the BioCubaFarma business group, a leading facility in Cuban biotechnology.

Biocen's director, Tamara Lobaina, underscored the collaboration of several specialists in the areas of switching, filling, revision, inspection, chemical and microbiological analysis, and in everything related to technology transfer.

She also emphasized that this Center has 'significant productive capacities that can achieve what is expected to satisfy the purposes in which we are engaged.