Vaccine trial beginning of pandemic’s end: Govt

THE MINISTRY INITIALLY MENTIONED IT WOULD TAKE 15-18 MONTHS BEFORE LICENCE FOR VACCINES IS ISSUED AND THAT THEY MAY NOT BE READY BEFORE 2021. THIS PORTION WAS RETRACTED LATER

nNEWDELHI:THE announcement of indigenous vaccine candidates COVAXIN by Bharat Biotech and Zycov-d Vaccine by Zydus Cadila against the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) will mark the beginning of the end of the pandemic, the Union ministry of science and technology said on Sunday.

“…Now the nod given by the Drug Controller General of India CDSCO (The Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation) for the conduct of the human trial for the vaccines, marks the beginning of the end,” read parts of a feature published in the India Science Wire, a science and technology news portal under the ministry.

Indian institutions have also engaged in research and development on vaccines in India, including the India Council of Medical Research-run National Institute of Virology (NIV) in Pune, and Hyderabad-based Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, which works under the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research.

The virus strain isolated for Bharat Biotech’s COVAXIN was isolated in NIV and transferred to the company on May 9.

The Zydus vaccine candidate that received the drug controller’s nod for conducting the first and second phases of human trials, was developed indigenously at the company’s Vaccine Technology Centre in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. The company plans to start the human clinical trials of its vaccine candidate in July 2020.

The ministry’s press release had initially mentioned that it would take anywhere between 15 and 18 months before a licence is issued for the vaccines, and that “none of these vaccines is unlikely to be ready for mass use before 2021.”

The ministry, however, later retracted the portions that mentioned a timeline for the vaccine.

Even though the science ministry officially did not issue a statement on the retraction, an official in the press information bureau of the government of India said on condition of anonymity that it had happened advertently; and that the purpose was to explain how vaccines work and the whole feature [published in the India Science Wire] was about that.

There was no time frame and that’s why it had been modified, the official said.

Along with the two Indian vaccines, COVAXIN and Zycov-d, the world over, 11 out of 140 vaccine candidates have entered human trials.

One of the leading candidates is AZD1222, developed by the Jenner Institute of University of Oxford and licenced to Astrazeneca, a British-swedish multinational pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical company which is based in Cambridge, England.

The MRNA-1273 vaccine developed by Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute, Washington and taken up for production by the United States-based Moderna pharmaceutical is just a step behind.

Both these firms have already inked an agreement with Indian manufacturers for production of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) vaccines.