Recbio Technology has picked European CRO OCT Clinical to run a phase 3 trial of the Chinese biotech's COVID-19 vaccine.
The study will evaluate the vaccine in healthy patients aged 18 and upward who have not previously been vaccinated for COVID-19 and have not been infected with the virus in the past six months. Recbio is targeting as many as 10,000 volunteers but has only asked OCT to enroll 2,000 participants across 11 research sites.
OCT will be in charge of regulatory and logistics support, project management, volunteer recruitment and monitoring for the trial. The financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.
It's not OCT's first foray into Chinese COVID-19 vaccine trials. Last year the CRO, which runs clinical operations in Central and Eastern Europe, enrolled 5,000 volunteers in a study of a vaccine developed by CanSino.
“We are happy that we came across OCT Clinical to run the next phase of our clinical study,” Recbio CEO Yong Liu said in a statement. “We have been impressed with the CRO’s portfolio and are counting on their professionalism and performance.”
COVID-19 vaccines returned to the headlines this summer as big pharmas revealed their candidates to take on current and future mutations of the virus. They included Pfizer, which in July launched a midstage trial of the first in a planned series of next-generation, variant-busting COVID-19 vaccines that the drugmaker is working on with BioNTech.