The World Health Organization is setting up a global training centre to help poorer countries produce vaccines, antibodies and cancer treatments using mRNA technology, which has been successfully used to produce vaccines against the coronavirus, AP reported.

At a briefing in Geneva on Wednesday, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the new centre would be based in South Korea and would share the mRNA technology being developed by WHO and partners in South Africa, where scientists are working to recreate the COVID-19 vaccine made by Moderna. These efforts are being undertaken without the help of Moderna.

This is the first time the WHO has supported such an effort to re-engineer a commercially marketed vaccine, bypassing the pharmaceutical industry, which largely favours supply to rich countries over poor ones, in both sales and production.

It is noted, however, that Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, makers of the two approved COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, have refused to share their vaccine formulations or technological know-how with WHO and its partners.

WHO has said that sharing the technology will hopefully lead not only to the creation of vaccines against the coronavirus, but will also be useful for antibody production, insulin and the treatment of diseases such as malaria and cancer.