Hyderabad: Bharat Bio-tech ties up with US firm, university for corona vaccine

Hyderabad: Bharat Bio-tech has targetted to bring "CoroFlu", an intranasal vaccine for Coronavirus in the next 18 to 24 months. In an interview with The Hans India, Suchitra Ella, Joint Managing Director and co-founder, Bharat Bio-tech said they have teamed up with scientists and virologists at University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA) and a vaccine company named FluGen for academic and technical collaboration.

They have earlier prepared a vaccine for flu and we want to utilise their expertise and cut short the time to develop vaccine for Covid-19, she pointed out.

Suchitra stated that safety of the vaccine is the first and foremost parameter and there are several other parameters, government's guidelines, clinical trials etc that need to be followed hence it would take "18 to 24 months.Vaccine and drugs development cost millions of dollars and in some cases nearly $ 200 to $300 million in countries like USA, Japan etc.The Bharat Biotech JMD made rotavirus vaccine, on which the company spent $100 million.

She acknowledged support reBiotechceived by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and some European countries in development of the vaccine. Vaccines have to be made available to larger population at affordable cost was the only objective, she said.She stated that Bharat Bio-tech supplies this vaccine to India and 100 more countries at just one dollar per dose procured through UNICEF model and distributed to the poorest of poor nations. Also, any of our vaccine does not cost more than Rs 1000 per dose, she pointed out.

We are in public health space in development of vaccines and therapies and hence we have ensured that we cannot be selling vaccines at high costs like 50, 60 or 70 dollars per dose in India. Our model is to keep costs low, but our volumes are very high like 100 million doses for any vaccine so that it reaches a large population in the world, Suchitra said.