Pneumonia epidemic: the reason India became the leader of the new crown vaccine-BBC News

Two weeks ago, United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the United States and India will work together to develop a new crown vaccine.

Pompeo’s announcement is not entirely surprising. Because in the past 30 years, India and the United States have launched internationally recognized joint vaccine development projects.

Cooperation projects between the two countries include vaccines to prevent dengue, intestinal diseases, influenza and tuberculosis infection. Among them, the dengue vaccine will be tested in the near future.

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India is also the world’s largest producer of generic drugs and vaccines, including six leading vaccine manufacturers. In addition, India also has many small-scale vaccine manufacturers, producing vaccines that include polio, meningitis, pneumonia, rotavirus, BCG, measles, mumps, and rubella.

Currently, there are 6 manufacturers involved in the development of new crown vaccines. One of them is the Indian Serum Institute. It is located in Pune, western India, and is the world’s largest manufacturer of vaccines to produce and sell doses.

The company has a 53-year history, produces 1.5 billion doses of vaccines per year, and employs about 7,000 people. In addition to its two main factories in Pune, it also has two small factories in the Netherlands and the Czech Republic.

The company provides 20 vaccines to 165 countries around the world. 80% of the vaccines it produces are for export, and the average price of each vaccine is 50 cents, making it one of the cheapest vaccines in the world.

Now, the company and Codagenix, a US biotech company, have begun developing an active attenuated vaccine (also called a live attenuated vaccine). Currently, it is reported that there are already 80 similar vaccine projects under development in the world.

This vaccine is made by reducing the toxicity of its pathogens or eliminating its harmful parts but keeping the activity unchanged. In other words, because pathogens are weakened under laboratory conditions, they will not cause disease or will only cause very minor illness.

In an interview with Bout India correspondent Soutik Biswas, Adar Poonawalla, CEO of the Indian Serum Institute, said they plan to conduct a group of animal experiments on the vaccine (including mice) in April. And primates), and we hope to carry out human experiments by September.

The Indian Serum Institute also cooperates with the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom to produce a large number of vaccines developed by the University of Oxford. Human clinical trials of the new crown vaccine from Oxford University with the support of the British government officially started last Thursday (April 23).

If all goes well, scientists hope to produce at least 1 million vaccines by September.

Professor Adrian Hill of the Jenner Institute in Oxford told BBC Correspondent for Health and Science Affairs James Gallagher that it is clear that the world will need hundreds of millions of doses of vaccine to end a major epidemic and lifting the blockade, and it is better to complete it before the end of the year.

This is also the advantage of the Indian vaccine manufacturers. A company where Mr. Bonavala only has an additional capacity of 400 to 500 million doses. Bonavala said that because they have enough investment in this, they have a large production capacity.

Not only that, Hyderabad-based Ballat Biotech also announced a partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the American company FluGen to produce nearly 300 million vaccines that can be sold worldwide.

Indian pharmaceutical manufacturer Zydus Cadilla is developing two vaccines. Two other Indian companies, Biological E and Mynvax, are also developing a vaccine.

At the same time, there are four to five other locally produced vaccines in India that are also in the early stages of development.

Investment and production capacity.

The chief scientist of the World Health Organization, Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, told reporters Bisworth that he would like to thank pharmaceutical companies and entrepreneurs. Due to your investment, quality and mass production of vaccines are possible. The manufacturers of these pharmaceutical companies, while benefiting the world, can also make their business successful, which is a win-win model.

However, experts caution that people should not arrive too early for vaccines to arrive.

Nabarro, a professor at Imperial College London, said that because there is no guarantee that a vaccine will be successfully developed, humans will have to face life threatened by coronaviruses for the foreseeable future.

Lahai, a vaccine researcher at the University of Vermont Medical Center, also warned that there are good reasons to worry that coronavirus vaccines may also cause adverse immune reactions.

The new global crown infection has reached almost 3 million people, and the death toll has exceeded 200,000.

Developing safe vaccines that can be produced on a large scale will be a time-consuming and labor-intensive task because each batch of products must undergo chemical and biological testing before leaving the factory.

But Mr. Bonavala said they still hope to have a safe and effective vaccine in two years or less.