As coronavirus cases spike up in hotbeds across the country, India's premier vaccine maker based out of Pune, Serum Institute of India (SII) said that they are expecting a timeline of atleast six months before we see one of their vaccines being deployed for public use.
Serum Institute of India has partnered with the University of Oxford to speed up the development of a safe and affordable Coronavirus vaccine. The private company has already ramped up trials and early-stage testing so that early prototypes of a "safe" vaccine would be made available as soon as possible.
Globally, COVID-19 cases have breached 12 million mark, with over 5,48,000 casualties reported.
The company's CEO issued a statement at a recent press conference adding that while work is underway, the researchers were in no rush and wanted to produce a safe and effective vaccine.
“Once we are confident of a safe and good vaccine for India and the world. We will certainly announce it when we are licensed by the Drug Controller (DCGI), but that is still at least six months away from now,"
"End of the year, we are hoping to have a vaccine. So we will discuss once the phase three trials for the product come about. Recently, there was news about another vaccine candidate which was being rushed. We do not want to rush anything. We want to emphasis on safety and efficacy...,"
Serum Institute of India's partnership with the University of Oxford
The statement follows up ICMR's August 15 deadline for one of the homegrown vaccines, COVAXIN, which has just started phase I of its human trials. The advanced deadline by the medical board was much debated by doctors, vaccine makers and other scientists for being "too risky" and was even labelled as a political move.
Oxford University-Astrazeneca backed vaccine model is currently in the middle of its phase II-III study and has shown promising results in the pre-clinical and early trials of its prototype. It is being said that the vaccine, one of the first to enter the human clinical trial phase will be the first to enter the market if approvals are met in time.
Under the pact signed with British-Swedish pharma maker AstraZeneca, Serum Institute will supply 1 billion doses of the vaccine in India and other low and middle-income countries, with a commitment to provide 400 million before the end of 2020.
SII's CEO also said that while we still have to wait for a vaccine to come, the only way to tackle the crisis is to increase the testing load, which they have done by partnering with a startup, Mylab, which was one of the first Indian companies to produce an affordable and speedy COVID testing kit.
"We have enough capacity in manufacturing testing kits. MyLab can produce 2 million kits per week. If you test, isolate and segregate, we can manage the situation till the good cure or vaccine comes around."
Meanwhile, Serum Institute of India has also struck a deal with US biotech firm Codagenix to develop a live-attenuated vaccine (based on a weakened strain) as well as an Austrian biotech company, Themis Bioscience which is modelling a vaccine based on a measles viral strain.
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