Chinese troops will be among the first to get jabs of one of China’s leading COVID-19 vaccine candidates.
On Monday, the Chinese biotech firm CanSino Biologics said in a statement to the Hong Kong stock exchange that China’s Central Military Commission gave the go-ahead for China’s military to inject soldiers with Ad5-nCoV, the company’s leading vaccine candidate, for a period of one year.
In the statement, CanSino Biologics chairman Yu Xuefeng said the vaccine candidate’s Phase I and II clinical trials demonstrated a “good safety profile” and high levels of immune response in patients. But he cautioned that the trials only show that the vaccine has the potential to prevent COVID-19 and that the military’s approval of the vaccine does not guarantee it will be authorized for broader commercial use in future.
Subscribe to Fortune’s weekly Eastworld newsletter for expert insight on what’s dominating business in Asia.
CanSino Biologics has been developing the vaccine in conjunction with the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, a medical research institute run by the People’s Liberation Army. The two organizations are basing the experimental COVID-19 vaccine on their previous collaboration on an Ebola vaccine. The Chinese government approved the Ebola vaccine for widespread use in 2017.
CanSino’s Ad5-nCoV candidate has long been China’s leading COVID-19 vaccine candidate, after it became the first in the world to begin clinical trials on March 16. The company conducted Phase I and II trials in Wuhan, China, and published the results of the trials in The Lancet medical journal.
In mid-May, CanSino also announced a partnership with the National Research Council of Canada and got the green light to begin clinical trials with Canadian patients. The trials are being conducted over a six-month period in partnership with researchers at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Two other China-based COVID-19 vaccine projects—one developed by state-owned Wuhan Institute of Biological Products and the other by Beijing-based biotech firm Sinovac—entered human testing earlier this year, making them some of the world’s most promising candidates.
As of Sunday, the World Health Organization said 17 COVID-19 candidate vaccines were in clinical evaluation, with another 131 in preclinical stages. The global scientific community is working at an unprecedented speed to develop an inoculation against COVID-19, which has infected more than 10 million people and killed more than 500,000 globally in the worst public health crisis in a century.
Yu founded CanSino Biologics in 2009, and its investors include Chinese venture capital firms such as Qiming Venture Partners and Lilly Asia Investors.
CanSino Biologics’ stock traded 5% higher on the Hong Kong stock exchange on Monday morning before returning to its Friday closing price by Monday afternoon. The company’s market capitalization has more than tripled to $5.3 billion since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. On Jan. 2, 2020, the company’s share price was HKD 59, and on Monday it closed at HKD 219.
