Bharat Biotech inks deal with US-based varsity for single dose intranasal COVID vaccine

Leading Indian pharma giant Bharat Biotech on Wednesday announced it would be manufacturing up to a billion doses of a single-dose intranasal COVID-19 vaccine in collaboration with the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, United States.

The Hyderabad-headquartered company owns the rights to distribute the vaccine in all markets except for the US, Japan, and Europe, the company has said. The agreement is expected to help overcome potential difficulties with distributing the vaccine, like the high cost of vaccination or a possible shortage of personnel to administer the doses to the required population.

While the phase one human trials will take place at the Treatment Evaluation Unit of Saint Louis University (SLU), also in St Louis, Bharat Biotech is expected to undertake further stages of the clinical trials in India “upon obtaining the required regulatory approval”, the company said in a release. It will also undertake large-scale manufacturing of the vaccine at its facility located in Genome Valley, Hyderabad.

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“We are proud to collaborate on this innovative vaccine. We envision that we will scale this vaccine to one billion doses. Individuals can be vaccinated by a single dose regimen. An intranasal vaccine will not only be simple to administer but also reduce the use of medical consumables such as needles, syringes, etc, significantly impacting the overall cost of a vaccination drive,” said Krishna Ella, chairman and managing director (MD), Bharat Biotech.

He further said that the company's experience in viral vaccines, manufacturing capabilities, and distribution continue to be its strong suit in ensuring safe, efficacious, and affordable vaccines. "It is prudent for Bharat Biotech to be involved in diverse but tenable projects to provide a much-needed vaccine against Covid-19 that reaches all citizens of the world."

According to the company’s statement, this intranasal vaccine candidate has shown "unprecedented levels" of protection in mice studies; for which the technology and data have been recently published in the scientific journal Cell and in an editorial in Nature, a British weekly scientific journal.

Earlier this month, phase two of the human clinical trial of Bharat Biotech's COVAXIN, India’s first indigenously developed vaccine against COVID-19, began at Post Graduate Institute (PGI) Rohtak. 

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