VOI - Voice of Indonesia | RRI - Radio Republik Indonesia

Head of the Eijkman Institute for Molecular Biology Amin Soebandrio said that developing the Merah Putih vaccine for COVID-19 is 50 percent complete.

"It's now at 50 percent, we just have to wait for the recombinant protein from the expression system that uses mammalian cells," Amin said in Jakarta, on Friday.

Amin expects in the next two to three months Eijkman can carry out a preclinical test of the Merah Putih vaccine, which was developed with a recombinant protein subunit platform in animals.

"We hope it will finish early next year," Amin said.

Amin said that the Eijkman Institute could amplify the target genes from the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. The gene has been cloned and inserted into mammalian cells and yeast cells, which are the expression system.

"We developed two systems (expression), one using mammalian cells and the second with yeast cells," Amin said.

The next process is to wait for the cells to express the recombinant protein that has been designed. If they have obtained the recombinant protein, they will inject it into the animal in the preclinical test stage.

The preclinical testing is expected to be completed in early 2021 and they can submit the vaccine seeds to PT BioFarma, which will plan vaccine seeds for clinical trials in humans.

"From a laboratory scale to an industrial scale, we must reformulate it to be injected into humans," Amin said.

Amin said that phase one clinical trials in humans will be carried out in the second trimester of 2021.

Phase one clinical trials can start after they formulate a vaccine candidate to be injected into humans and the Health Ministry allows it.

"We expect the permit process to be shorter, maybe in two weeks we will complete it," Amin said.

According to Amin, it is possible that the Merah Putih vaccine could be mass-produced to meet the needs of the Indonesian people by the end of 2021.

He also explained that the Eijkman Institute was developing a vaccine using other platforms.

"It's just a backup. We also study what they have done in China with the whole virus. But it's not the main thing, which is the recombinant protein," he said. (Antaranews)