India Races In Search For Elusive Coronavirus Vaccine: 5 Things You Must Know

The Prime Minister in his address to the nation yesterday had invited scientists and medical professionals to take up the challenge to develop a vaccine for coronavirus. In India institutes and private firms have already started the search for the vaccine and are racing to develop it to help with the coronavirus pandemic. Here are some of the latest development on this front by Indian companies which are racing to develop the vaccine.

A researcher works on the development of a vaccine against the new coronavirus COVID-19, in Belo Horizonte, state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. FILE PIC/AFP.

The Prime Minister in his address to the nation yesterday had invited scientists and medical professionals to take up the challenge to develop a vaccine for coronavirus. In India institutes and private firms have already started the search for the vaccine and are racing to develop it to help with the coronavirus pandemic. Here are some of the latest development on this front by Indian companies which are racing to develop the vaccine.

• Pune based Serum Institute of India, manufacturers of Vaccines and immuno-biologicals announced a collaboration with New York-based pharmaceutical firm Codagenix Inc to develop a vaccine. The companies aim at developing ‘a live-attenuated vaccine (LAV) against the emergent coronavirus’. LAVs are sourced from disease-causing microorganisms and are weakened in laboratory conditions. These are then used to vaccinate individuals. Since the pathogen is in a weakened state it only causes mild disease and helps our immune system to remember it. According to an official release ‘a live-attenuated vaccine has multiple advantages, including mounting an immune response to multiple antigens of the virus and the ability to scale for mass production.’
• Another Pune- based biotechnology private firm Seagull BioSolutions is also working on developing a vaccine. It has recently received funding from the Department of Science and Technology (DST) for its research. The company is using Active Virosome Technology (AVT) for the vaccine. According to a statement by the company ‘AVT is useful for producing novel, non-hazardous & economical active virosome agents expressing desired antigens from the target pathogen. These will be used to develop a novel vaccine for the prevention of COVID-19 infection and also immunodiagnostic ELISA kits for COVID-19.’
• Pharmaceutical firm Zydus Cadila based in Ahmedabad is also researching for the vaccine. The company said in a statement that they will be looking at two approaches for this- development of a DNA vaccine against the viral membrane protein which is used by the virus to enter living cells and development of a live attenuated recombinant measles virus vectored vaccine against COVID-19. According to the company the vaccine has reached animal trials.
• Hyderabad-based pharmaceutical company Bharat Biotech is collaborating with University of Wisconsin-Madison and US-based company FluGen to develop the vaccine. According to reports the company will build on FluGen’s flu vaccine candidate M2SR and develop a ‘one-drop nasal vaccine’.
• Reports also say that the National Institute of Virology in Pune which was successful in isolating the coronavirus is also researching for developing a vaccine. Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), said in a statement that isolation of the virus is the first step towards expediting the development of drugs, vaccines and rapid diagnostic kits in the country. It will still take 18 months and two years to develop a Covid-19 vaccine even if the clinical trials are expedited.

Globally several pharma giants and research institutes are racing to develop a vaccine that can curb the spread of the virus. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), three vaccines for the coronavirus have been approved to be moved to the human trials stage. There are about 70 vaccines under trial out of which, three, two from China and one from the U.S. have moved to human trials.  On April 14 Pharmaceutical firms Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) joined hands to speed up and develop an adjuvanted vaccine for COVID-19 disease.