How a Chinese firm jumped to the front of the coronavirus vaccine race

BEIJING - When a group of Chinese scientists gathered over barbecue and beer in a Toronto backyard a decade ago, talk drifted to their homeland's vaccines, which had long lagged the developed world on quality and safety. Four of them decided to act.They left top positions at global pharmaceutical companies in Canada to set up a biotechnology firm half a world away in Tianjin, China, hoping to produce vaccines on par with Western countries.

CanSino"deserves credit for the speed with which they pushed the vaccine through pre-clinical studies and human testing," said Wang Ruizhe, a pharmaceutical industry analyst at Capital Securities in Shanghai."It tells you something about their ability to mobilise and leverage the resources that it takes to get all these done. The resources required here are substantial."

The name CanSino represents the Chinese characters for health, hope and promises, while in English it's a combination of Canada and China. Besides Yu, other top officials at the firm have Canadian connections. Chief Scientific Officer Zhu Tao was also a senior scientist at Sanofi Pasteur in Canada. The company's success has relied on threading the needle between both nations.

The team started human clinical trials in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the coronavirus was first detected, on March 16. Massachusetts-based Moderna, seen as one of the best contenders to produce an American vaccine, started its tests in the US the same day. Less than a month later, CanSino began the second phase of wide-scale human trials.

Final-stage trials could yet stymie CanSino's outsized ambitions. Its Ebola vaccine was approved on an emergency basis after two stages of human testing, but the company never completed the final phase as the epidemic petered out in Africa. CanSino doesn't generate much revenue because most of its products, including two late-stage meningitis vaccines, are still in development.

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