Malaysia developing its own Covid-19 vaccine, says health minister

Health Minister Dr Adham Baba today announced that Malaysia is in the process of developing its own Covid-19 vaccine.

Speaking at a press conference today, he said the initiative was a collaborative effort between the ministries of health; science, technology and innovation; higher education and defence.

“We are in the process of developing a Covid-19 vaccine, the genetic positioning technology of the messenger RNA which is conducted by the Institute for Medical Research Malaysia (IMR),” he said.

He said according to IMR, work on the mRNA vaccine which began in November is currently at the stage of cloning the virus, including the original virus genome and other SARS-CoV-2 variants.

He added that the mRNA vaccine was still at the proof-of-concept stage, where specific viral gene sequences are analysed in order to ensure that the vaccine candidate is able to elicit an immune response against the virus.

“We are so far in the process of developing the process for conducting pre-clinical efficacy tests for small and large animals,” he said.

“After this stage, human clinical tests including Phase 1, Phase 2 and Phase 3 will be conducted before the registration manufacturing process of the vaccine can proceed.”

He added that human clinical tests would take several months.