A new, open, transparent sublicence agreement between the Medicines Patent Pool (MPP) on behalf of C-TAP, and South African pharmaceutical company Biotech Africa will accelerate the manufacture and sale of a COVID-19 serological antibody technology around the world.
The World Health Organization welcomes the sublicence agreement, the first of its kind to be signed under the auspices of the WHO’s COVID-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP) initiative.
C-TAP was set up in 2020 to facilitate the timely, equitable and affordable access to COVID-19 health products.The new agreement builds on a licensing agreement announced by WHO and MPP last year with Spain’s National Research Council (CSIC).
The non-exclusive sublicence allows Biotech to manufacture and commercialize CSIC’s COVID-19 serological test worldwide.“The most effective way to get – and keep – ahead of COVID-19 is to keep testing,” said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General. “This new agreement means we can take advantage of untapped manufacturing capacity so more people in more countries can have easier access to affordable diagnostics.”The test effectively checks for the presence of anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies developed either in response to a COVID-19 infection or to a vaccine.