Lviv scientists have stopped the development of a Ukrainian vaccine against coronavirus infection, said the head of the Institute of Cell Biology of the National Academy of Sciences, academician Andrei Sibirny.
“The vaccine was successfully tested at the first stage: the experimental mice developed antibodies to the virus. But then it was necessary to check whether the vaccine protects against death due to COVID-19 in transgenic mice in Poland, because there are no corresponding laboratories in Ukraine. It failed because the National Research Foundation of Ukraine was fooling us for half a year, but it didn’t allow us to transfer money to Poland, although there is no ban on this”, the academician said in a commentary to Suspilny.
According to him, the Ministry of Health responded to his inquiry that they did not plan to finance the development of a vaccine and offered to contact other organizations and funds.
Sibirny noted that earlier there was interest in the Ukrainian vaccine on the part of the country’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, and now, when many foreign vaccines have appeared on the market, official Kiev does not want to develop its own drug against COVID-19.