By Alistair Smout

LONDON (Reuters) – AstraZeneca (NASDAQ:) Plc on Thursday struck a deal with the firm behind Imperial College London’s experimental COVID-19 vaccine to develop and sell drugs based on its self-amplifying RNA technology platform in other disease areas.

VaxEquity is a Vaccinologist from Imperial who founded the company. If certain milestones are achieved, VaxEquity could be paid up to $195m. AstraZeneca will also pay royalties for approved drugs as well as equity investments made by Morningside Ventures, which is a life science investor.

AstraZeneca has an existing adenoviral vector COVID-19 vaccination and highlighted the use of self-amplifyingRNA (saRNA), technology for novel therapeutic programs beyond the coronavirus epidemic.

Mene Pangalos (AstraZeneca Research Chief) said, “The collaboration with VaxEquity provides a promising new tool for our drug discovery toolbox.”

The technology works in a similar way to the messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines made by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna (NASDAQ:).

A self-amplifying vaccine RNA vaccine encodes instructions to the host cell for making a coronavirus proteins. It also makes many copies of that RNA, which allows the doses to be reduced and more affordable.

According to Imperial’s Shattock, “It’s a little like having a manufacturing plant. Instead of one recipe, you have many copies you can pass around to multiple production lines in the cell to make more protein.” It has the ability to take lower doses.

Imperial’s COVID-19 vaccine will be retooled in order to generate a consistent immune response. We also plan on studying future coronavirus variations.

AstraZeneca has the opportunity to work with AstraZeneca on 26 potential drug targets that could be used against cancers or rare genetic diseases.

Pangalos stated that self-amplifyingRNA will enable us to identify novel therapeutic areas not accessible to conventional drug discovery.

American companies Gritstone bio, Arcturus and Arcturus are also working on saRNA COVID-19 vaccinations.

Shattock stated that safety data from the initial COVID-19 vaccine trials, which were released ahead of peer review in July, was encouraging and that it would soon be available for Phase I.

He said that the reason why we took so long was due to coming from an academic environment. We might have been quicker if we had that relationship with AstraZeneca at the start of 2020.