UAQ to Close Project Quivax 17.4: Updates on COVID-19 Vaccine Research

The Autonomous University of Querétaro (UAQ) will close in this year the project of the vaccine Quivax 17.4 against Covid-19 and will deliver the results for future research. This was reported by the rector Teresa García Gasca, who implied that the biological will not be mass-produced, noting that the budget it was only enough for four prototypes.

The academic suggested that the vaccine, whose development began around April 2020, did not have sufficient resources, because while the UAQ obtained financing close to 13 million pesos, the Patria vaccine required about a billion. Because of this, the project only reached prototype levelso it will not be applied as a reinforcement in the population.

“We are going to close the project this year. Closing the project does not mean that the project will not continue, but rather that, like any deadline, the results obtained will be delivered, a lot of knowledge has been generated and we are going to deliver several prototypes. of the vaccine, with good results, but at the prototype level because it was what it reached us for, ”he said.

García Gasca mentioned that the plan is register a patent of the vaccine, and deliver the advances of the prototypes for future scientific advances in the university. He argued that the vaccine will be delivered symbolically to the sociedadsince it was this that mainly financed the project.

“There is no other instance that has provided us with a resource other than society, the UAQ, AMEXCID, which at the time already received the technical report of what was done with that resource, so it is a delivery to society and the way in which what we can deliver is to have the information available to the people,” he explained.

Although he did not give a date for the progress to be published, he assured that in 2023 the first Scientific articles about. He indicated that they are currently presenting at the Congress of the Mexican Society of Immunology at the Querétaro Congress Center.

As a result of the Covid-19 health emergency, the UAQ was one of the first universities country to start research to create a vaccine. However, despite various actions to obtain resources to develop it, the vaccine remained in preclinical phase; It was never tested on humans, let alone received approval from the COFEPRIS for your emergency use.