July 31, 2020 – Pfizer (New York, NY) and BioNTech SE (Germany) announced an agreement with the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW) in Japan to supply 120 million doses of BNT162 mRNA-based vaccine candidate against SARS-CoV2 (the virus that causes COVID-19), subject to clinical success and regulatory approval, beginning in 2021.
Financial details of the agreement were not disclosed, but the terms were based on the timing of delivery and the volume of doses. As requested by the Government of Japan, deliveries of the vaccine candidate are planned for the first half of 2021.
The companies also say they have begun a Phase 2b/3 safety and efficacy trial and “remain on track to seek regulatory review as early as October 2020, and manufacture globally up to 100 million doses by the end of 2020 and approximately 1.3 billion doses by the end of 2021.”
Recently, two of the companies’ four investigational vaccine candidates – BNT162b1 and BNT162b2 – received Fast Track designation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). This designation was granted based on preliminary data from Phase 1/2 studies that are currently ongoing in the U.S. and Germany as well as animal immunogenicity studies.
