Fiocruz receives 100% Brazilian COVID-19 vaccine registration

Brazil’s Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) has received assent from the National Agency of Sanitary Surveillance (Anvisa) for the alteration in the register of the COVID-19 vaccine (recombinant), which requested the addition of the Foundation as a producer of the Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient (API).

After the transference of UK pharma major AstraZeneca’s (LSE: AZN) technology and with the approval of Anvisa, the Foundation is now the first institution in the country that is allowed to produce and distribute a 100% Brazilian COVID-19 vaccine to the Ministry of Health.

Fiocruz started the national production on July 2021, after the signing of a contract for Technology Transfer with the partner AstraZeneca. Up to this moment, the Immunobiological Technology Institute (Bio-Manguinhos/Fiocruz) has the equivalent of 21 million doses of national API, in different steps of production and quality control. The first doses of the immunizations are expected to be bottled in January and delivered to the Ministry of Health in February, as soon as the quality control tests that occur after the vaccine's final processing stages implementation are completed.