India hopes five locally-tested vaccines will help it to control Covid-19, as those developed by Pfizer and Moderna may not be available to it in big quantities soon.
The five candidates include Russia’s Sputnik-V whose “Phase-II going to Phase-III” trials in India will start next week in collaboration with Dr Reddy’s Laboratories, Vinod Paul, the head of a committee advising the prime minister, said.
The other experimental vaccines are the one being developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University which is being manufactured by the Serum Institute of India; Bharat Biotech and the Indian government’s COVAXIN; Zydus Cadila’s ZyCoV-D and lastly one being developed by Biological E Ltd alongside Baylor College of Medicine and Dynavax Technologies Corporation.
Paul told a news briefing that AstraZeneca vaccine’s last-stage trials in India had gone well and had almost been completed.
The country has reported 8.87mn infections, second only to the United States, and 130,519 deaths as a result of Covid-19.
But the daily coronavirus infections fell to their lowest since mid-July, with 29,163 new cases reported for the last 24 hours, the Health Ministry said
Daily cases have fallen in India since hitting a peak in September.
“We are very hopeful that we will be successful with the five vaccines,” Paul said yesterday.
“They are easy platforms, availability of doses is very high. They will be able to control our pandemic in terms of the numbers of doses required.”
Paul said the government was also watching the progress of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, both of which have said interim results of last-stage trials of their candidates showed that they were more than 90% effective.
Unlike Pfizer’s vaccine which must be kept at -70C or below, Moderna’s can be stored at normal fridge temperatures, making it more suited for poorer countries such as India where cold chains are limited.
“This obviously will be a very big hindrance to scale up the vaccine,” Paul said of Pfizer’s, adding that if India finds itself needing to do so it will pursue this option.
“If we are required to form our strategy on this particular vaccine, then we will proceed with it. Though, even if we get it, we will get it in a few months only. But talks are ongoing.”
Both vaccines use the mRNA technology which means the vaccine is not embedded with the virus itself and, therefore, no risk of catching Covid-19 from the shot itself.
The vaccine is infused with a piece of genetic code that trains our immune system to recognise the spike protein on the surface of the virus - a lethal signature of the coronavirus.
Health experts said mRNA vaccines can be very promising in the fight against the pandemic despite the challenges.
According to Dr Monika Gupta of Fortis Hospital in New Delhi, unlike a normal vaccine, RNA vaccines work by introducing an mRNA sequence (the molecule which tells cells what to build) which is coded for a disease-specific antigen (like Sars-CoV-2, the coronavirus). Once produced within the body, the antigen is recognised by the immune system, preparing it to fight the real thing.
“RNA vaccines are faster and cheaper to produce than traditional vaccines and an RNA-based vaccine is also safer for the patient, as they are not produced using infectious elements,” Gupta said.
Production of RNA vaccines is laboratory-based, and the process could be standardised and scaled, allowing quick responses to large outbreaks and epidemics.
“A major advantage of RNA vaccines is that RNA can be produced in the laboratory from a DNA template using readily available materials, less expensively and faster than conventional vaccine production,” she explained.
Dr Naveen Aggarwal of Action Cancer Hospital in New Delhi said mRNA vaccines are very promising in the fight against the Covid 19 pandemic “as the efficacy claims between 90 to 95% by various manufacturers. However, results of the trial are still awaited.”