(Yicai Global) Feb. 4 -- British pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline and international cooperation organization, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, yesterday announced that they would work together to develop vaccines for the novel coronavirus amid a spreading pneumonia epidemic which has claimed 425 lives on the Chinese mainland, Xinhua News Agency reported.

The Brentford-based firm will provide its existing vaccine adjuvant platform technology to support the accelerated development of candidate vaccines. Adjuvants are additives that can enhance the vaccine's immune response, and, in the event of a pandemic, can reduce the amount of antigens needed for each dose of the vaccine, thereby enabling the production of more doses of vaccines for more people.

GSK will work with other CEPI-backed research institutions, and reached its first deal over 2019-nCov with the University of Queensland. The Australian university is researching a vaccine technology called molecular pliers, and the study has expanded to the development of candidate vaccines for the 2019-nCoV.

The CEPI, an alliance formed by the governments of Norway and India, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the United Kingdom's Wellcome Trust at the World Economic Forum 2017, has also partnered with Germany's CureVac and United States firms Inovio Pharmaceuticals and Moderna in response to the 2019-nCoV epidemic.

Besides the CEPI partnerships, the US-based Johnson & Johnson and France's Institut Pasteur also recently announced research on the 2019-nCoV vaccine.

The 2019-nCoV-caused pneumonia epidemic was first detected in Wuhan, capital of central China's Hubei province, in December. The overall confirmed cases on the Chinese mainland had reached 20,438 by the end of yesterday, the National Health Commission said, noting that a total of 425 people had died of the disease.

The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention announced on January 26 that it had started R&D for 2019-nCoV vaccines. Various firms, including Guanhao Biotech and Chongqing Zhifei Biological, have also said they are conducting vaccine research.

Editor: Peter Thomas