 "In pictures: Serum's Adar Poonawalla among 6 named 'Asians of the Year'")
Adar Poonawalla, the chief executive of the world's largest vaccine manufacturer Serum Institute of India, is among six people named "Asians of the Year" by Singapore's leading daily, The Straits Times for their work in fighting the Covid-19 pandemic. Pune-based Serum Institute of India (SII) has collaborated with the University of Oxford and the British-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca for making the Covid-19 vaccine, ''Covidshield'', and is conducting trials in India.
Professor Zhang Yongzhen, 55, of China's Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre helped kick-start the process of working towards an end to the pandemic. He and his team, according to the report, worked through two straight nights in early January - after receiving their first sample of the mysterious illness then plaguing the city of Wuhan in central Hubei province - to map the first complete genome of the virus.
Japanese Dr Ryuichi Morishita, 58, a professor of clinical gene therapy at Osaka University, is working with home-grown biotech start-up AnGes on a DNA vaccine.
Singapore's Professor Ooi Eng Eong, 53, is leading scientists at the Duke-NUS Medical School and US pharmaceutical firm Arcturus Therapeutics in developing a messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine.
Seo Jung-jin, chairman of one of South Korea's largest pharmaceutical firms, Celltrion, and the country's second-richest man, is investing 300 billion won (S$368 million) into producing an antibody treatment that will complement the Covid-19 vaccines. Celltrion is also South Korea's biggest distributor of biological medicines worldwide.
The China's premier biochemical warfare expert Chen Wei, 54 spearheaded the efforts to diagnose and contain the Covid-19 outbreak. According to the report, in barely 50 days, she and her team had produced a potential vaccine with Chinese firm CanSino Biologics ready for clinical trials. It became the world's first vaccine to be approved for restricted use.