Romanian doctors are testing the first vaccine against Covid 19. The Americans and the Chinese are ready to invest

By rbj
“A very important day for OncoGen: we have the vaccine, the equivalent of 1000 doses. The vaccine is currently for testing in the laboratory ”, announces the university professor doctor Virgil Păunescu, the director of the OncoGen Center, within the Emergency County Clinical Hospital in Timișoara.
The professor Dr. Virgil Păunescu also says that the team of researchers from OncoGen, which he coordinates, completed the synthesis of the vaccine yesterday, and today the tests for the vaccine against Covid-19 have already begun.
“Our vaccine has a characteristic, unlike other vaccines. Our vaccine is not suitable for animal testing. We will research in the laboratory for about a month, a month and a half how the cells of the immune system react and which is the best dose. Because we are negotiating with the Medicines Agency, we could go on to vaccinate the first 10 volunteers.
It could be autumn, depending on how the Romanian authorities help us. We need funding. We’re missing a few appliances. I’m not telling you how hard it was to get the peptides from Germany. I received them this morning.
Today, Chinese Embassy officials contacted us and somewhere at 6 pm we ended a discussion with three US investment funds with whom we agreed to find a US research team to work with. Let them be reassured that we are not talking silly, let us be reassured that the vaccine will be available in all markets of the world.
In a month’s time, if we have the positive results we expect, either the Romanian state helps us, or we call on the Chinese state or the American state, to produce it, “Păunescu said.
The researchers at the Center for Gene and Cell Therapies in Cancer Treatment – OncoGen, from the Timisoara County Emergency Clinical Hospital announced at the end of January that a personalized vaccine to protect against the new Coronavirus could be developed using technology used in personalized vaccination. cancer and posted the technology on the site oncogen.ro. Earlier this week, OncoGen Timisoara received reagents for the first tests in Germany.
Virgil Păunescu stated in an interview that the OncoGen team of researchers made the vaccine production technology public so that any drug company could use it at any time: “The data made public by other groups are very few, because most research groups want to patent ideas first in order to benefit from a possible profit. In my opinion, at present, hundreds of researchers working for a vaccine against Covid-19 probably work in the world. However, we did not want to keep the information hidden. Given the seriousness of the situation, we have decided to make all our data available to anyone who wants to use it. For the time being, we have released the technology of producing a vaccine against Covid-19, made here at Oncogen, and with great chances of success. And, because I made the decision not to patent it, anyone can use it. ”
The Center for Gene and Cell Therapies in Cancer Treatment – OncoGen, within the Timisoara County Emergency Clinical Hospital, is the first research center in the field of gene therapies with state-of-the-art facilities in Romania and the only one of its kind in Eastern Europe with facilities of fundamental and applied research for translational medicine.