China Plans To Launch Hepatitis E Vaccine ‘This Year’

After more than a year of scrutiny and inspection by China’s State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA), a hepatitis E vaccine developed by Chinese scientists should be available by the end of the year. Scientists developed the vaccine at the National Institute of Diagnostics and Vaccine Development in Infectious Diseases (NIDVD) at Xiamen University. Its approval by the SFDA follows phase III clinical trials published in the medical journal The Lancet in 2010, which found it to be 100 percent effective in preventing infection. Xiamen Innovax Biotech (known as INNOVAX), the university’s research and development arm, is now preparing to take the vaccine through to market, according to Steven Gao, Innovax’s general manager. It is anticipated that the Chinese vaccine will be the first in the world to go into production. In 2007, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) developed a separate vaccine, in collaboration with the United States Army. Phase II trials of the vaccine carried out in...