After Pfizer, AstraZeneca plans to test COVID-19 vaccine combinations with Russia’s Sputnik V developers

• AstraZeneca has announced that it will be testing different combinations of the COVID-19 vaccine with Russia’s Gamaleya Institute, which is developing the Sputnik V vaccine.
• This comes after the UK government said that AstraZeneca will be conducting a ‘mix and match’ trial with Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine candidate starting January 2021.
• According to AstraZeneca, testing out different vaccine combinations gives patients and doctors a wider choice of prevention approaches.

AstraZeneca, which is currently developing a COVID-19 vaccine with Oxford University, has announced plans to test different vaccine combinations with the Gamaleya Institute. They are the developers behind Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine.


This comes after the head of the UK’s vaccine taskforce Kate Bingham announced another ‘mix and match’ trial between AstraZeneca and Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccines earlier this week. The trial will test whether combining the doses from developers would work better than administering them individually.

The push on combining different COVID-19 vaccine stems from the fact they could potentially provide patients and doctors with a wider choice of prevention approaches, according to AstraZeneca.

Meanwhile, the vaccine being developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University is yet to get approval from regulatory authorities for emergency use, including India.


Sputnik V-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine combinations
Russia’s Gamaleya Institute had reached out to AstraZeneca on Twitter last month to ask whether the two should come together to try and boost the vaccine’s effectiveness.

Enrollment for the Sputnik V-AstraZeneca clinical trials will kick-off starting today. The Russian Direct Investment Fund, the county’s sovereign wealth fund which has funded the development of Sputnik V, believes that testing of the AstraZeneca’s vaccine in combination with its own will begin by the end of the month.

This is around the same time that the Pfizer-AstraZeneca combination trials also expected to occur. The patients will receive one dose of the Pfizer vaccine and another shot of the vaccine being made by AstraZeneca.

“Being able to combine different COVID-19 vaccines may be helpful to improved protection and/or to improve vaccine accessibility. This is why it is important to explore different vaccine combinations to help make immunisation programmes more flexible, by allowing physicians greater choice at the time of administering vaccines,” the company said in a statement.

In India, the COVID-19 vaccine being developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University will be manufactured by the Serum Institute of India. It’s the preferred vaccine candidate as compared to Pfizer and Moderna due to its ability to survive in warmer temperatures, putting less of a strain on India’s limited cold storage infrastructure.

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