Bharat Biotech in tie-up to develop a Covid vaccine
- IBEF
- April 7, 2020
Bharat Biotech announced that it has entered into partnership with the University of Wisconsin Madison and US-based company FluGen to develop a vaccine, Coro-Flu, against Covid-19. Ms Raches Ella, head of business development at Hyderabad-based Bharat Biotech, said the company will develop the vaccine, conduct clinical trials and prepare to produce almost 300 million doses of vaccine for global distribution.
“Under the collaboration agreement, FluGen will transfer its existing manufacturing processes to Bharat Biotech to enable the company to scale up production and produce the vaccine for clinical trials,” said Ms Ella.
Presently, the company commercialised 16 vaccines, including a vaccine developed against the H1N1flu that caused the 2009 pandemic, it said. It plans to develop CoroFlu with the help of FluGen’s flu vaccine candidate known as M2SR. This is based on an invention by UW–Madison virologists and FluGen co-founders Mr Yoshihiro Kawaoka and Ms Gabriele Neumann, M2SR is a self-limiting version of the influenza virus that stimulates an immune response against the flu. Ms Ella added that “Kawaoka’s lab will insert gene sequences from SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes the disease Covid-19, into M2SR so that the new vaccine will also induce immunity against the coronavirus”.
Development of the CoroFlu vaccine concept and its testing in laboratory animal models at UW-Madison is expected to take three to six months. After that, Bharat Biotech will scale up production for safety and efficacy testing in humans. By the fall of 2020, the vaccine could be in human clinical trials, as per the company. It added, four Phase I and Phase II clinical trials have shown the M2SR flu vaccine to be safe and well tolerated. The ability of M2SR to stimulate a strong immune response, make it an attractive option for developing CoroFlu as an effective vaccine, it said.
Disclaimer: This information has been collected through secondary research and IBEF is not responsible for any errors in the same.
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