Korean approval for homemade COVID-19 vaccine

South Korean firm SK bioscience (KRX: 302440) has announced that SKYCovione, the Asian country’s first COVID-19 vaccine candidate adjuvanted with GSK’s (LSE: GSK) pandemic adjuvant, has been authorized by the Korean Ministry of Food and Drug Safety.

With this milestone approval, South Korea has become one of the few countries in the world to have both a domestically-developed COVID-19 vaccine and a treatment.

SKYCovione is a self-assembled nanoparticle vaccine targeting the receptor binding domain of the SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein for the parental SARS-Cov-2, jointly developed with the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington School of Medicine with combination of GSK’s pandemic adjuvant.