(Yicai Global) Dec. 30 -- China’s Sinovac Life Sciences will expand output at its Covid-19 vaccine production base at the Beijing Daxing Biomedical Industrial Park by an additional one billion doses a year, the Beijing Daily reported today.

The unit of Beijing-based pharma giant Sinovac Biotech currently has an annual production capacity of 300 million doses, it said. No details about investment amounts or completion dates were given.

Sinovac Life is likely putting to good use the USD515 million cash injection that it received from Sino Pharmaceutical, one of the country’s biggest generic drugmakers, earlier this month to develop its inactivated vaccine.

The Daxing Biological Park has already lured investment from over 4,000 biopharmaceutical firms. Earlier this week, Walvax Biotechnology announced that it will build a Covid-19 vaccine plant at the industrial park with an annual output of 150 million doses a year. The Kunming, southwestern Yunnan province-based drugmaker is developing a chimpanzee adenovirus-vectored jab that has been demonstrated to confer immunity to rhesus monkeys but has yet to be tested on humans.

Sinovac Life’s CoronaVac, which uses a killed rather than an attenuated form of the novel coronavirus, is at the final stage of Phase III clinical trials. It was declared safe and effective by Brazilian researchers last week, but the company has yet to make public the results of its trials.

Editor: Kim Taylor