The Serum Institute of India plans to make up to 10 crore doses of coronavirus vaccine each month, starting next year, said CEO Adar Poonawalla. The Pune-based drug maker has partnered with global pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca to produce the COVID-19 vaccine for the University of Oxford for low- and middle-income countries. Nicknamed Covishield, the COVID-19 vaccine is currently in phase III clinical trial in India.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Poonawalla revealed that the pharmaceutical company is increasing its production capacity by the end of 2021 to more than 250 crore doses a year to cope with future disease outbreaks. Poonawalla’s company now has an annual dose capacity of 150 crore.
So far, the company has manufactured 5 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine for the University of Oxford. It has already applied for authorization for the emergency use of the vaccine in India. India’s drug regulator said this week that it had sought more data to make a decision on emergency authorization for AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 candidate vaccine.
“It will still be two months (after licensing) before large volumes are deployed,” said the CEO.
Covishield is a very effective vaccine against the new coronavirus, Poonawalla said previously. AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford previously said that their drug had shown an average 70% effectiveness in stopping the virus after testing it on 23,000 people. It uses a weakened version of a chimpanzee common cold virus that encodes the instructions for making proteins from the new coronavirus to generate an immune response and prevent infection.
India will be the first priority for the delivery of the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine, the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer by volume mentioned above. “The COVID-19 vaccine will initially be distributed in India, then we will look at the COVAX countries that are mainly located in Africa. Our priority is the countries of India and COVAX,” Poonawalla said.
The world’s largest vaccine producer will also manufacture another formulation developed by Novavax Inc. Organizations like the GAVI vaccine group and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are backing both candidates for large-scale distribution around the world.
SII has obtained funding from GAVI and the Gates Foundation to deliver up to 20 crore doses of both vaccines to India and other low- and middle-income countries. Under this agreement, the 10 million rupee doses of the coronavirus vaccine will have a maximum price of $ 3 each.
Covishield is logistically feasible for distribution in the urban and rural areas of the country, as it can be stored between two and eight degrees Celsius.
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