Cure for the pandemic: India to play decisive role in fighting virus

Researchers at Oxford started testing the candidate vaccine, “ChAdOx1 nCoV-19,” on more than 1,110 people last month. Trials determine the efficacy of a vaccine while identifying possible side effects.

Last week, a study showed the Oxford vaccine could prevent SARS-CoV-2-related pneumonia in primates. Poonawalla said he is hopeful India will play a decisive role in manufacturing a vaccine, and, pending successful trials, up to 40 mn doses could be ready by October. Based in Pune, SII makes 1.5 bn vaccine doses every year, and it currently produces 20 vaccines for 165 countries. Excerpts from an interview:

The decision was made solely to have a head-start on manufacturing and to have enough doses available. The distribution will only commence once the trials are successful and it is proven the vaccine is effective and safe for use. We are working on conducting our own human trials in India this month. The focus of initial tests is to ascertain whether the vaccine works, induces a good immune system response and has no unacceptable side effects.

More than 100 potential COVID-19 candidate vaccines are now under development by biotech and research teams around the world. At least six of these are in preliminary testing in humans for what are known as Phase 1 clinical trials. Although the Oxford vaccine, called “ChAdOx1 nCoV-19,” has not yet been proven to protect against COVID-19 infection, Serum decided to start manufacturing after it showed promise in the pre-clinical phase and progressed to human trials. There are several indicators the vaccine being developed by Oxford will be a good one. The technology of this vaccine has been successful before and we are hopeful this will be safe. We need to be lucky in the clinical trials to get enough people without COVID-19 in the control group to show conclusively that the vaccine is working well. But the fact that we have a potential vaccine candidate in such a short period of time is definitely something to cheer about.

We will surely keep pricing affordable. We aim to manufacture 4 to 5 million doses per month, and then we want to scale up production to 10 million doses a month, based on the success of the trials. We anticipate manufacturing up to 20-40 million doses by September-October. If the trials are successful, we will make the product available in as many countries as possible, including India. When a vaccine is developed, we plan to sell it for around $13 per dose. We are partnering with Indian Council of Medical Research for the clinical trials and are also in touch with the Department of Biotechnology. I will leave it to the Indian government to decide which countries will get how much of the vaccine and when.

Both affordability and reliability are key. At this stage, we need multiple companies across the world to try various vaccine trials. For example, through our association with US-based biotechnology firm Codagenix, we have developed a vaccine-virus strain that is identical to SARS-CoV-2. We have commenced our pre-clinical trials and hope to progress to the human trial phase by September or October. The aim is to make that vaccine available by early 2021 to combat the novel coronavirus.