China's CSPC Pharma collaborates with Pfizer for Oral COVID Treatment

To increase treatment accessibility in China, the Chinese pharmaceutical company CSPC Pharmaceutical Group said later this week that it has partnered with Pfizer in a strategic alliance to introduce a local brand of an oral COVID-19 therapy. Patients with mild to severe COVID-19 symptoms who are at risk of disease development are treated with the Nirmatrelvir and Ritonavir combination, marketed as Paxlovid, an oral small molecule created by the pharmaceutical company Pfizer.

Paxlovid was approved for use by the US Food and medicine Administration in December 2021, making it the first COVID-19 medicine that may be taken at home. Since early 2020, China has been racing to develop vaccines utilising messenger RNA (mRNA) technology, despite the fact that its home-grown vaccines are thought to be less effective than the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA shots. Earlier this year, CSPC said China had approved its first domestically developed mRNA vaccine against COVID-19, a major achievement in a country that has declined to use Western COVID shots to support domestic research.