Through a virtual meeting, the Board of Fundación Copec-UC, composed of its chairman Roberto Angelini and board members Ignacio Sánchez, Pedro Pablo Rosso, Eduardo Navarro and Jorge Andueza, announced that it will donate 150 million pesos to the Catholic University team that is currently testing four strategies for developing a vaccine against Covid-19.

This fund adds to a support committee, made up of senior representatives of the foundation. This contribution will benefit the project to develop a vaccine against Covid-19, in which scholars Alexis Kalergis, Susan Bueno, Katia Abarca and Pablo González are currently working.

The importance of developing a national vaccine against Covid-19 lies, first of all, on the need to ensure Chileans massive access to a potential vaccine, without depending upon imports. Furthermore, with many projects under development globally that may fail in clinical trial stages, there is consensus in the scientific world of the importance of exploring differentiated strategies.

A successful vaccine against Covid-19 could be given to the entire world population to produce immunity against a virus that is extremely difficult to eradicate, due to a lack of knowledge of this pathogen and the contribution of asymptomatic people to high levels of infection. As of today, more than 3.6 million cases of Covid-19 have been confirmed worldwide and over 257 thousand people have died.

“Today more than ever we must support scientific research to respond to the serious health crisis that Chile and the world are experiencing. The development of this prototype of the vaccine against Covid-19 is led by a team of Chilean scientists who have spent more than 15 years of research in the area of ​​respiratory diseases and who developed the first vaccine against the syncytial virus in our country. This, added to the support of top-tier institutions including the Catholic University, the Millennium Institute on Immunology and Immunotherapy (IMII) and the Technological Consortium in Clinical-Molecular Biomedicine (BMRC), provides broad support to the work being carried out and that we trust will achieve the results that we all hope to address the pandemic. Faced with a challenge of this magnitude, unity of purpose, social cohesion and active collaboration between different groups in society seem to be the only way,” said Fundación Copec-UC chairman Roberto Angelini.

Thus, Fundación Copec-UC continues to make progress in its mission of supporting innovation for the benefit of people’s quality of life and contributing to the solution of some of the major challenges that Humanity faces, both locally and globally.