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Exclusive | How a Chinese Covid-19 drug was created in an instant – after years in the making
- Tsinghua University’s Zhang Linqi was focusing on HIV when his attention was turned to a mystery virus in Wuhan last year
- Now he and his team have developed an antibody medication that could be approved in China within weeks
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Chinese viral immunologist Zhang Linqi considers himself lucky that he and his team developed a Covid-19 treatment and vaccine so swiftly and so effectively.
Zhang, based at Tsinghua University in Beijing, is the driving force behind an antibody treatment that cut hospitalisation and deaths by 78 per cent in multicentre clinical trials and is expected to be approved in China within weeks. The vaccine has just completed early-stage trials and is expected to proceed soon to late-stage human trials.
The treatment, being commercialised by Brii Bioscences, was put together in two months and the vaccine took five months. The treatment appears to work well against all existing variants of the virus.
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“We can be sure all these existing variants, including Delta, have not escaped our antibodies. We are very lucky,” Zhang said.
But it was less luck and more sheer determination built on a wealth of experience in responding to new pathogens that enabled Zhang, 58, and his team to quickly rise to the rescue in this pandemic.
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“Developing a treatment drug and a vaccine sounds lightning fast – even to me – but actually it benefited from years of research in antibody drugs and vaccine developments in HIV research,” Zhang told the Post in an interview.
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