June 29
South Korea's food and drug ministry on Wednesday approved the use of the country's first homegrown COVID-19 vaccine.
The Ministry of Food and Drug Safety (MFDS) said it made an "item approval" decision on SKYCovione, developed by SK Bioscience, a pharmaceutical unit of the country's third-biggest conglomerate SK Group, on the premise that the company submits the final result of its clinical trials.
The SKYCovione, also known as GBP510, is a self-assembled nanoparticle vaccine, jointly developed with the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington School of Medicine, SK Bioscience said.
It was the country's first COVID-19 vaccine that had completed all three phases of clinical trials. The phase-three clinical trial was conducted on 4,037 adults in six countries, including Thailand, Vietnam, New Zealand, Ukraine, the Philippines and South Korea.
SKYCovione was designed to administer two doses in a four-week interval.
According to latest data from the health authorities, about 87 percent of the South Korean population had received two doses of COVID-19 vaccines, and 65 percent of the population had gotten booster shots.
xinhua
