Kalbe would also incorporate government agencies in the process to ensure public access to the vaccine once the trials showed positive results, the company’s president director Sie Djohan said.

“We hope research and development on the COVID-19 vaccine can yield positive results to ensure vaccine access for Indonesia can be secured,” he said in a press statement on Thursday.

The DNA vaccine prototype is being developed by a consortium of biotech companies and research institutions, namely Genexine, Binex, the International Vaccine Institute, GenNBio, the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and Pohang University of Science and Technology.

The candidate vaccine, called GX-19, has been tested to primates, resulting in an antibody on the test subjects that could neutralize the novel coronavirus.

Globally, there are 10 candidate vaccines that are in clinical evaluation and 115 candidate vaccines in preclinical evaluation, including GX-19 as of Wednesday, according to the World Health Organization’s document.

Clinical trials on humans for vaccine candidates are divided in a three-phase process, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

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