Coronavirus: Why will the world seek a vaccine in India?

United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said last week that India and the United States were working together to develop coronavirus vaccines.

Mr. Pompeo’s comment was not entirely surprising.

The two countries have carried out an internationally recognized joint vaccine development program for more than three decades.

They have worked to stop dengue, enteric diseases, the flu, and tuberculosis. Trials of a dengue vaccine are planned in the near future.

India is among the largest manufacturers of generic drugs and vaccines in the world. It is home to half a dozen of the leading vaccine manufacturers and a large number of the smallest, who dose against polio, meningitis, pneumonia, rotavirus, BCG, measles, mumps, and rubella, among other diseases.

Now half a dozen Indian companies are developing vaccines against the virus that causes Covid-19.

One of them is Serum Institute of India, the largest manufacturer of vaccines in the world by number of doses produced and sold worldwide. The 53-year-old company manufactures 1.5 billion doses each year, primarily from its two facilities in the western city of Pune. (It has two other small plants in the Netherlands and the Czech Republic.) About 7,000 people work for the company.

The company supplies about 20 vaccines to 165 countries. About 80% of its vaccines are exported, and at an average of 50 cents a dose, they are some of the cheapest in the world.

Now, the firm has teamed up with Coldagenix, a US biotech company, to develop a “live attenuated” vaccine, among the more than 80 that are reportedly under development worldwide.

This vaccine is created by reducing the virulence, or eliminating the damaging properties, of a pathogen but keeping it alive. (They do not cause disease or are very mild because the pathogen weakens under laboratory conditions).

“We are planning a set of animal tests [on mice and primates] of this vaccine in April. By September, we should be able to start human trials, “Adar Poonawalla, executive director of the Serum Institute of India, told me by phone.

Mr Poonawalla’s firm has also partnered to mass produce a vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and endorsed by the UK government. A genetically modified chimpanzee virus would form the basis of the new vaccine. Human clinical trials began in Oxford on Thursday. If all goes well, scientists hope to do at least a million doses by September.

“It is pretty clear that the world will need hundreds of millions of doses, ideally by the end of this year, to end this pandemic and get us out of lockdown,” said Professor Adrian Hill, who runs the Jenner Institute in Oxford. James Gallagher, BBC Health and Science Correspondent.

This is where Indian vaccine manufacturers have an advantage over others. Mr. Poonawalla’s firm only has an additional capacity of 400 to 500 million doses. “We have a lot of capacity since we have invested in it,” he says.

There is more. Hyderabad-based Bharat Biotech announced a partnership with the University of Wisconsin Madison and US firm FluGen to manufacture nearly 300 million doses of a vaccine for worldwide distribution. Zydus Cadilla is working on two vaccines, while Biological E, Indian Immunologicals and Mynvax are developing one vaccine each. Four to five other home vaccines are in the early stages of development.

“The credit should go to entrepreneurs and pharmaceutical companies that invested in quality manufacturing and processes that made bulk production possible. The owners of these companies have also had the goal of doing good for the world, while also managing a successful business and this model is beneficial to everyone, “Soumya Swaminathan, chief scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO) told me.

Experts caution that people shouldn’t expect a vaccine on the market anytime soon.

David Nabbaro, professor of global health at Imperial College London, says humans will have to live with the coronavirus threat “for the foreseeable future” because there is no guarantee that a vaccine will be successfully developed.

And Tim Lahey, a vaccine researcher at the University of Vermont Medical Center, cautions that there is “good reason to worry that a coronavirus vaccine will also elicit harmful immune responses.”

Global Covid-19 infections have already exceeded 2.5m with more than 177,000 deaths. Developing a safe vaccine that can be mass produced will be a time consuming exercise: each batch must be chemically and biologically tested before being released. “But we are hopeful, very hopeful, of having a safe and effective vaccine in two years or less,” says Mr. Poonawalla.

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