New Delhi: Six Indian companies are working on a vaccine for COVID-19. They have joined the global race against time to find a preventive for the deadly infection spreading rapidly across the world. This information was provided by a top Indian scientist Wednesday.
Nearly 70 ‘vaccine candidates’ are being tested and at least three have moved to the human clinical trial stage, but a vaccine for the novel coronavirus is unlikely to be ready for mass use before 2021. COVID-19 has so far infected more than 1.9 million in the world and has claimed 1,26,000 lives.
Names of Indian companies
“Zydus Cadila is working on two vaccines. Serum Institute, Biological E, Bharat Biotech, Indian Immunologicals, and Mynvax are developing one vaccine each. They are racing against time,” Gagandeep Kang, executive director of the Translational Health Science and Technology Institute, Faridabad, said.
Kang is also vice-chair of the Coalition for ‘Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI)’. The body in a recent study noted that ‘global vaccine R&D effort in response to the COVID-19 pandemic is unprecedented in terms of scale and speed’.
But it is a complicated process with many stages of testing and many challenges, explained experts. A vaccine for the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, may not take 10 years that other vaccines do. However, it could be at least a year before it is proven safe, effective, and made widely available, they said.
Process to prepare proper vaccine
“Vaccine development is a lengthy process which often takes years, with many challenges,” said E Sreekumar, a scientist of RGCB in Kerala.
“Generally, vaccines take several months to pass the different stages of testing, and then approvals also take time. For COVID-19, we don’t expect a vaccine to come in this year,” agreed Rakesh Mishra, another researcher at CCMB, Hyderabad.
Vaccine testing typically begins with animal and lab testing before going on to different stages of human testing. The human testing phase is composed of many phases,” Sreekumar informed.
“Phase one trials are small-scale, usually involving few participants, to assess whether the vaccine is safe for humans. Phase two trials often involve several hundred subjects. They are done to mainly evaluate the efficacy of the vaccine against the disease. The final phase involves thousands of people to further assess the efficacy of the vaccine and can last several months. That is why we don’t see a vaccine coming in at least a year from now,” Sreekumar added.
Challenges in producing vaccine
Even after the vaccine is ready there are a lot of challenges. One has to find whether the vaccine is effective in all populations. Also if it can be used for different strains of the novel coronavirus, which might start mutating as time passes, said Sreekumar.
“There are lots of vaccines which are being tested for COVID-19, some of which are in the stage 1 clinical trial,” Mishra informed.” But we still don’t know how fast they will proceed towards a vaccine. It can take several months to reach any point,” he added.
Kang has named six Indian companies trying to produce a vaccine for coronavirus. However, WHO has listed only Zydus Cadila and Serum Institute from India as among the global firms working on a COVID-19 vaccine.
Agencies
