Cadila Healthcare (Zydus Cadila) on July 1 said it plans to roll out its COVID-19 vaccine ZyCoV-D in 45-60 days, subject to regulatory approvals and manufacturing scale-up.
The company has filed an application with the Drug Controller General of India (DCGI) seeking emergency use authorisation (EUA) of the ZyCoV-D vaccine.
Zydus said it can produce 4 to 5 lakh doses at its old facilities and expects to produce one crore doses monthly from mid of August, once the new manufacturing facility, expected to come on board from the end of July, is operational.
"We are aspiring to produce about 5 crore doses by December," said Dr Sharvil Patel, Managing Director, Cadila Healthcare.
On the pricing of the vaccine, Patel said the company will announce it before the commercial launch of the jab.
Patel said the company hasn't stockpiled any doses currently. Zydus has invested in upwards of Rs 400-500 crore involving clinical trials and scaling up of manufacturing
Efficacy data
Zydus Cadila said its COVID-19 vaccine ZyCoV-D demonstrated 66.6 percent efficacy against symptomatic RT-PCR positive cases in the interim analysis.
Patel said the interim efficacy analysis was based on 79-90 RT-PCR positive events of the phase-3 trial.
"India our event data is April-June, all indications are that that is the only prevalent strain in the country. Of Seropositive RT-PCR cases that we have done, we did a subset analysis of randomly selecting about one-third of them, all of them have been delta positive cases," Patel said.
Zydus said no moderate cases of COVID-19 disease was observed in the vaccine arm post administration of the third dose suggesting 100 percent efficacy for moderate disease. Zydus said it has found no severe cases or deaths due to COVID-19 occurred in the vaccine arm after administration of the second dose of the vaccine.
The company said it would take about 4-6 months to publish peer-reviewed phase-3 data.
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