MOSCOW (AP) – Russian health authorities have approved testing a combination of AstraZeneca’s vaccine with Russia’s Sputnik V in their fight against coronavirus, according to the national registry of approved clinical trials.
The small study, which began on July 26 and will run until March of next year, will involve 150 volunteers and review the safety of the mixture responding to the virus and its possible side effects, according to the documents. It will be held at five medical facilities in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
AstraZeneca developed its vaccine together with the University of Oxford. Sputnik V was developed by the state-run Gamaleya Center in Moscow, with resources from the Russian Direct Investment Fund. Both use a similar technology, injecting a harmless virus into the body to insert genetic material from a COVID-19 protein to elicit an immune response.
Authorities last year introduced the Sputnik V vaccine, which involves two injections, but they also offered the first as an alternative and dubbed it Sputnik Light.
The creators of Sputnik V proposed combining it with AstraZeneca’s in November, suggesting that it would make the British vaccine more effective. AstraZeneca announced a study of the mix in December.
In May, however, an ethical medicine panel at the Russian Health Ministry suspended the approval process, asking for more data.
According to the Sputnik V vaccine Twitter account, the approval given by the ministry this week comes at a time when similar trials are taking place in Azerbaijan, Argentina and the United Arab Emirates.
“Other trials of Sputnik Light are being developed in other countries in order to increase the efficacy of other vaccines,” the creators of Spuntik V expressed on the Twitter account.
Russia gave Spuntik V regulatory approval in August 2020. There was initially some skepticism at the national and international level because it was barely tested on a few people. The British medical journal The Lancet, however, later published an article stating that other trials had shown good results, in which the vaccine was shown to be 91% effective.
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