Sanofi Pasteur, an international biopharmaceutical company with offices in Swiftwater, announced it is assisting the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to advance work on a vaccine for the novel coronavirus.

The company is working with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, which is part of the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, to aid them in using Sanofi’s recombinant DNA platform technology to expedite a potential vaccine.

Referring to company information, Michael Szumera, the head of U.S. Communications for Sanofi Pasteur in Swiftwater, said, “The recombinant technology produces an exact genetic match to proteins found on the surface of the virus. The DNA sequence encoding this antigen will be combined into the DNA of the baculovirus expression platform, the basis of Sanofi’s licensed recombinant influenza product.”

The influenza product is known as Flublok.

Early stage work on the COVID-19 vaccine will be done at Sanofi’s Protein Sciences facilities in New York and Connecticut, he said. Work on the later stages may be done in Swiftwater, but that has yet to be determined.

The work was originally done by Protein Sciences, acquired by Sanofi in 2017, to generate a SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) vaccine candidate. In late 2002, the SARS coronavirus emerged and then largely disappeared by 2004. COVID-19 is part of a family of coronaviruses that can cause respiratory disease.

In nonclinical studies, the vaccine candidate provided partial protection in animal challenge models.

Szumera said this work will give researchers a head start on a vaccine for COVID-19. Couple this with Sanofi’s influenza product, Flublok, it will allow for relatively quick clinical testing and aid in producing large quantities of the coronavirus antigen.

He said it’s too early to know how much vaccine will be needed and where it will be distributed.

“It is too early to determine quantities as the epidemiology of this illness and the scale of response is still being assessed,” he said.

Vaccine distribution would be based on public health priorities as established by public health authorities. At this stage, the use of the vaccine would not be limited to the U.S.”