China grants first patent for COVID-19 vaccine

By Masood Sattar Khan
(Pakistan News & Features Services) 

In a big breakthrough on fight against pandemic, China's National Intellectual Property Administration has granted its first patent for a COVID-19 vaccine. 

The patent was jointly applied for by a research team with the Academy of Military Sciences and CanSino Biologics Inc, a Chinese high-tech biopharmaceutical company, People's Daily reported. 

The team led by Chen Wei, a researcher at the Institute of Military Medicine under the academy, has developed the recombinant COVID-19 vaccine, with the modified defective adenovirus as the vector. 

As per findings the vaccine can induce strong cellular and humoral immune response in a short period of time. It can be produced quickly on a large scale to cope with a COVID-19 outbreak. The vaccine has now finished phase-1 and phase-2 clinical trials, which have verified its safety and immunogenicity, the newspaper report added.