BEIJING: China’s Walvax Biotechnology Co has started work on a plant to manufacture an early-stage coronavirus vaccine candidate similar to AstraZeneca PLC’s product, state-backed media said on Sunday.

Mass production for the proposed vaccine could begin in mid-2021, with an estimated capacity of 200 million doses a year, said Health Times, a paper run by the People’s Daily.

The treatment is based on a chimpanzee adenovirus to deliver materials that can trigger an immune response against the virus that causes Covid-19, a technique adopted in the candidate from AstraZeneca and Oxford University.

The Chinese candidate, jointly developed by China’s Tsinghua University and Tianjin Medical University, has not been tested on humans. The AstraZeneca-Oxford treatment is in final-stage large trials.

AstraZeneca’s late-stage trials in Britain and Brazil last month found an efficacy of 62% for trial participants given two full doses but 90% for a subgroup given a half, then a full dose. A Reuters investigation this week revealed problems with the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine study.

Adenovirus is used in other Covid-19 vaccine candidates, including one from China’s CanSino Biologics Inc, which is based a harmless common cold virus known as adenovirus type-5 (Ad5).—Reuters