Pharmaceuticals Announce Production of Sputnik V in South Korea

The Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), GL Rapha (a leading South Korean biotech company), and ISU ABXIS (a subsidiary of ISU Group) signed Thursday an agreement for technology transfer and production of the Sputnik V vaccine in that Asian nation, RDIF sources said.

In February, GL Rapha completed the organization of the consortium for the production of Sputnik V in South Korea, a process that will include eight leading pharmaceutical companies.

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The agreement now signed between RDIF, GL Rapha, and ISU ABXIS is the first trilateral technology transfer contract with a Korean consortium company. Pilot production of the vaccine at the ISU ABXIS facility in Yong-In is expected to begin at the end of April.

RDIF CEO Kirill Dmitriev said in this regard, "Korea (South) is one of our main partners for the production of Sputnik V, and thanks to the agreement with ISU ABXIS, we hope to increase production facilities in the country."

He added that the vaccine "is approved for use in 60 countries with a total population of 3 billion people, and we continue to increase production to meet the growing demand for the Russian vaccine."

Meanwhile, ISU ABXIS Business Development chief Soohyun Jeong commented in this regard that this is the first case where the consortium officially signed a contract with RDIF along with the actual technology transfer.

He added that the company "will make every effort to resolve the production technology and sufficient supply of Sputnik V as soon as possible."

The news of this new agreement to produce the Russian drug comes on the heels of the results of a recent opinion poll by British polling house YouGov, which sampled 9,417 respondents from nine countries.

The study was interested in preferences regarding vaccines and the nations that manufacture them.

Fifty-four percent of respondents rated Russia as the most trusted vaccine-producing country, along with the United States.

In the selection of three vaccine-producing nations they trusted the most, respondents ranked the United Kingdom third. 

Sputnik V is, according to the survey, the most recognizable: seven to eight out of ten respondents (74 percent) have heard of the Russian vaccine, which is also among the two most preferred vaccines, just after the one produced by Pfizer/BioNTech.

The survey was conducted from February 18 to March 3 by YouGov, the UK's leading market research and data analytics company. It was conducted in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe.

Residents of India, Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines, Vietnam, Argentina, Algeria, the United Arab Emirates, and Serbia participated. More than 2 billion people, equivalent to more than 25 percent of the world's population, live in these countries.