Vaccine maker Adimmune Corp (國光生技) has gained an approval from Indonesia’s health regulator to conduct phase 1 and 2 clinical trials for its experimental COVID-19 vaccine in the Southeast Asian country, as it aims to tap the Muslim-based market with halal certification, the company said yesterday.
The trials in Indonesia would be Adimmune’s first overseas human tests for its experimental COVID-19 vaccine, after the Ministry of Health and Welfare ordered it to redo its phase 1 trial in Taiwan in December last year to determine the optimal dosage.
Adimmune yesterday said that the Indonesian trials would determine the optimal dosage for its vaccine to generate adequate protection against COVID-19 variants and prove its efficacy.
Photo courtesy of Adimmune Corp
The company plans to recruit 240 healthy adults aged between 18 and 65 to participate in the phase 2 trials, spokesman Pan Fei (潘飛) told the Taipei Times yesterday.
Despite encountering a setback in Taiwan, Adimmune did not modify the formula of its COVID-19 vaccine, dubbed AdimrSC-2f, nor its recombinant protein manufacturing technology, Pan said.
Adimmune’s candidate was developed in spring last year, before the emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant. However, the company said it had tested its candidate against the variant in animal tests earlier this year, and that it showed good potential.
Unlike most finished clinical trials, which provide participants with two doses of an experimental vaccine, Adimmune’s clinical trials in Indonesia would give participants three doses, Pan said, adding that the company’s phase 2 trial would require more time and results are expected to be released next year.
The company is to produce the experimental COVID-19 vaccine at its factory in Taiwan and export it to Indonesia for the human trials, in collaboration with the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at Universitas Gadjah Mada, Pan said.
Adimmune said it expects to complete the phase 1 and 2 trials early next year, but it would not seek emergency use authorization (EUA) upon completion, Pan said.
Instead, the company plans to apply to the Indonesian regulator to conduct a phase 3 trial there, he said.
“Timing for applying for an EUA has passed, as there are many available COVID-19 vaccines on the market,” Pan said. “Besides, an EUA is temporary. We aim to conduct the clinical trials without missing any steps and apply for a marketing approval that is valid for a long time.”
If Adimmune gains marketing approval from Indonesia for its COVID-19 vaccines, there is a good chance that the company would be able to provide its vaccine to other Muslim markets, Pan said, adding that the company has obtained a halal certification with its COVID-19 vaccine candidate.
Indonesia has the world’s largest Muslim population, consisting of about 87 percent of its 270.6 million inhabitants.
As with Moderna Inc, Adimmune would consider combining its flu vaccine into COVID-19 vaccine if its candidate is approved, although that mixture would not be a focus for research and development at this time, Pan said.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
JOINT EFFORTS: MediaTek would partner with Denso to develop custom chips to support the car-part specialist company’s driver-assist systems in an expanding market MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s largest mobile phone chip designer, yesterday said it is working closely with Japan’s Denso Corp to build a custom automotive system-on-chip (SoC) solution tailored for advanced driver-assistance systems and cockpit systems, adding another customer to its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business. This effort merges Denso’s automotive-grade safety expertise and deep vehicle integration with MediaTek’s technologies cultivated through the development of Media- Tek’s Dimensity AX, leveraging efficient, high-performance SoCs and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to offer a scalable, production-ready platform for next-generation driver assistance, the company said in a statement yesterday. “Through this collaboration, we are bringing two
RSS