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New Delhi: With the world joining hands to find a vaccine for Covid-19, all eyes are on India, the power of vaccine manufacturing.
India produces 60 percent of the world’s vaccines and accounts for 60-80 percent of the United Nations’ annual vaccine procurement. Several Indian companies have also helped over the years to produce and distribute vaccines to the world.
“The world is looking at India,” said Dr. Krishna Ella, President and CEO of Bharat Biotech. “Since Covid-19 is a unique challenge, teamwork and global partnerships will be crucial to making a safe and effective vaccine available to all.”
Last month, United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo saying The times of India that the United States and India are working together on therapies and Covid-19 vaccines.
Today, not only major vaccine manufacturers, such as Bharat Biotech, the Serum Institute of India (IBS), and Zydus, are competing to develop a coronavirus vaccine. Even mid-tier companies like Gurugram-based Premas Biotech, Ahmedabad-based Hester Biosciences, and startups Neuberg Supratech and Mynvax have also joined the efforts.
“India mass-produces vaccines for major international agencies like the World Health Organization and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,” said Anant Bhan, associate professor and researcher in bioethics at Yenepoya University in Mangaluru. “You can definitely take advantage of its ability to mass-produce a Covid-19 vaccine whenever it’s ready.”
Bhan added that India will help reduce the price of these vaccines. “India will be the only country that will sell at the lowest possible price due to its mass production capacity,” he said. “Reasonable price would be the only factor in guaranteeing access to the Covid-19 vaccine worldwide.”
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A broad established global network
What works for India in the race for a vaccine is that several Indian companies are key players in the global vaccine industry.
The Pune-based IBS is the the largest vaccine manufacturer in the world by number of doses produced and sold worldwide. The 50-year-old company manufactures 1.5 billion doses each year, primarily from its two facilities in Pune.
It specializes in a variety of vaccines such as polio, diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, and BCG (Bacillus Calmette – Guérin). According to the companyIts vaccines are being used in around 170 countries around the world for their national immunization programs.
Other Indian companies have proven experience in responding to pandemics.
Hyratbad-based Bharat Biotech has so far marketed 16 vaccines, including one against H1N1 flu, which caused a pandemic in 2009.
“We were the first company in the world to predict, work and file a patent on the Zika vaccine before the United States and the WHO recognized the problem,” Ella said. “Therefore, the identification of viral threats has been a strength of the Indian biotech industry, giving us a position of great strength.”
About 90 percent of the company’s vaccines are sold in low-to-middle-income countries. He holds 160 worldwide patents and sells products in more than 65 countries.
Another pharmaceutical giant, the Ahmedabad-based Zydus group, which was the first to develop and locally manufacture the vaccine to combat swine flu during the 2010 outbreak, is also developing the Covid-19 vaccine through its research arm in Europe, Etna Biotech.
The company is betting on its robust manufacturing facilities that would quickly accelerate the production of vaccine candidates, once the proof of concept is established.
Premas Biotech has licensed its vaccine candidate to Akers Biosciences Inc, USA. USA Premas specializes in creating recombinant proteins for vaccine development. These proteins target the three SARS-CoV-2 virus proteins: the spike protein, the envelope protein, and the membrane protein.
The ability to target all three offers a strong argument for the shot.
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“India ahead of the curve, should take the lead”
The industry also believes that India is ahead of the Covid-19 curve and should take the lead in vaccine production.
“India certainly is ahead of the curve,” Ella said, praising the government’s effort to relax regulatory standards and retention companies that need support at every stage of development.
“India must take a leadership role and establish itself as a central and significant player in this pandemic,” said Dr. Prabuddha Kundu, managing director of Premas Biotech, adding that the most immediate need and role for India to play in this The time is “to allow for large-scale manufacturing, to allow for quick approvals, guidelines, and collective wisdom to administer the appropriate vaccine.”
“The big vaccine manufacturers in the country already have distribution networks. They will be able to reach the whole world very quickly “, Adar Poonawalla, CEO of the Indian Whey Institute (SII) had said The previous impression. IBS you are taking the risk of starting production even before the vaccine has reached advanced clinical trials.
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Collaborations and associations
Vaccines are the best long-term strategy for fighting pandemics, although coronavirus vaccines for all the strains we’ve known so far, such as SARS, MERS, and even the common cold, have been notoriously difficult to develop because of their rapid mutation.
Vaccines are expected to be refined each year to keep up with mutations.
The strategic approach to vaccine development by biotech companies in India is to collaborate with academia, universities, research organizations and virologists to develop vaccines in joint support.
Once development is complete, Indian companies master the art of accelerating mass production and distribution worldwide.
Show collaborations.
A leading candidate for a COVID-19 The vaccine is the one being developed by the University of Oxford, which is collaborating with IBS. The vaccine has shown promising results in animal testing on rhesus monkeys, considered the closest to humans for medical testing purposes. Called ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, the vaccine is a weakened version of the ChAdOx1 virus that infects chimpanzees.
Even though there is still no clinical evidence that the vaccine works in humans, IBS plans to be ready. That plans to produce up to 400 million doses next year if all goes well.
Another candidate vaccine, developed by IBS, is in association with US biotech firm Codagenix. The vaccine was among the first pandemic candidates to reach the preclinical stage of animal testing in mid-February.
The company is jointly developing a live attenuated vaccine. It means that the vaccine will be created using a live virus but reducing its virulence. “It may be ready for the market in 2022”, Poonawalla had previously told ThePrint.
Similarly, Bharat Biotech has partnered with the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the American company FluGen to develop a vaccine, Coro-Flu.
The company will develop the candidate vaccine invented by UW-Madison virologists and FluGen co-founders Yoshihiro Kawaoka and Gabriele Neumann. The vaccine is based on an existing flu vaccine called M2SR. Contains the weakened live H3N2 influenza virus.
“The Kawaoka lab will insert gene sequences from SARS-CoV-2, the new coronavirus that causes Covid-19 disease, into M2SR so that the new vaccine will also induce immunity against the coronavirus,” the company said. had said.
In anticipation of high demand, the company has established a new line to produce 300 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines annually.
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The price factor
India has been able to achieve affordable prices through economy of scale. A classic example is the case of the Rotavac vaccine for “rotavirus” infections. India was able manufacture and sell at almost a fifteenth of the market cost in 2013.
A similar price trend is expected now when the world is dealing with a pandemic. For example, IBS has said will sell a dose for just Rs 1,000.
“We will not consider the price of the vaccine as an important issue. Even today, we sell all of our vaccines at very low prices, “said Poonawalla.
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