Serum Institute, AstraZeneca in talks for vaccine Supply

MUMBAI: Serum Institute of India is in advanced talks with British drugmaker AstraZeneca Plc to manufacture and distribute Oxford University’s Covid-19 vaccine candidate in low and middle income countries including India.

“At this point, our discussion with AstraZeneca is ongoing. However, we can certainly say that it will be more than 100 million doses that we will be able to provide to them,” said Serum Institute CEO Adar Poonawala to ET on Thursday. “India will get the vaccine if the trial succeeds. The country will gain access to the doses as it will also be the requirement of the Government of India. And we are certain that everybody will respect if substantial volumes go to India,” he added.

UK company bags orders for 400 million doses

Serum’s facility is already equipped to make this Covid-19 vaccine.

Poonawala’s comments came hours after the UK company, which is commercially developing Oxford University’s potential vaccine called AZD1222, said it had obtained orders to supply 400 million doses of the vaccine candidate and secured capacities to manufacture 1 billion doses by 2020 and through 2021.

AstraZeneca also received $1 billion from the US government’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) for the development, production and delivery of the vaccine, starting in September. The development programme includes a Phase-III clinical trial with 30,000 participants and a paediatric trial. The vaccine is currently undergoing Phase-I and II trials.

AZD1222 failed to show positive results on monkeys in an experiment. But it remains one of the promising Covid-19 vaccines that are currently undergoing trials.

AstraZeneca is also engaging with international organisations such as the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), Gavi the Vaccine Alliance and the World Health Organization (WHO) for fair allocation and distribution of AZD1222. It is also in discussions with governments around the world to increase access.

Discovering a vaccine for Covid-19 has become modern medicine’s holy grail, with attempts on across the world. Earlier this week, the Dow Jones Index shot up after US-based biotech company Moderna announced that preliminary trials for its coronavirus vaccine had shown favourable results.

As countries across the world look forward to the development of both preventive vaccines and treatment for Covid-19, the challenges of access and scaling up of manufacturing capacities for servicing hundreds of millions of people are coming to the fore.

It is here that pharma experts say Indian companies will play a role. Besides Serum, Indian manufacturers like Bharat Biotech, Panacea and Biological E have been one of the largest suppliers of immunisation vaccines through aid organisations like UNICEF, Gavi and WHO.

While 80% of global vaccine sales come from large MNC companies like Pfizer, Sanofi, MSD, GSK and J&J, these companies often outsource and share technology to companies and other vaccine manufacturers in countries like India and China.

“It is just not possible for one company to manufacture vaccines for the rest of the world, so we will see multiple candidates for Covid-19 and multiple Indian companies will manufacture them,” said Ranga Iyer, former MD of Wyeth India (the vaccine division that is now part of Pfizer). “Indian vaccine companies have the advantage of quantity, quality and price, so any manufacturing agreement will not be just another contract manufacturing deal,” he added.

However, Indian vaccine companies said that there needs to be an aggressive push from the government for securing these global vaccines. “We have seen France, UK and UK securing them through funding these companies, Indian government so far has been quick with approvals, but we need to push to secure these global vaccines too,” said an official of a vaccine company who did not wish to be quoted.

The Department of Biotechnology has given funding to companies like Bharat Biotech, Zydus Cadia, Serum Institute for their vaccine candidates for India, but all of them are still in clinical stage and won’t hit the market before 2021. Serum has four other candidates of its own under development, for which it has tied up with a German company Themis, US vaccine platform company Codagenix, and it is in talks with other two companies.