Bharat Biotech working on variant-specific jabs

Hyderabad-based Bharat Biotech has begun work on variant specific vaccines against Covid-19 and is likely to use strains of the SARS-Cov-2 virus shared with it by the Indian Council of Medical Research’s Pune based National Institute of Virology (NIV)

Hyderabad-based Bharat Biotech has begun work on variant specific vaccines against Covid-19 and is likely to use strains of the SARS-Cov-2 virus shared with it by the Indian Council of Medical Research’s Pune based National Institute of Virology (NIV) .

India’s vaccine expert group is considering a second booster, at least for vulnerable groups, HT reported on Tuesday. (HT)

“At least five strains under circulation were shared earlier for the company to be able to tweak their vaccine,” said a senior expert in the government aware of the matter, requesting anonymity.

The company’s indigenously developed Covaxin vaccine is one of the mainstays of India’s vaccine programme, albeit, to a lesser extent than the Serum Institute of India produced Covishield. Covaxin was developed by the company in partnership with ICMR using a viral strain shared by it with NIV.

The company it did not clarify till the press time whether it is developing a bivalent vaccine (one which can act on multiple strains), when asked about the same on Wednesday.

India’s vaccine expert group is considering a second booster, at least for vulnerable groups, HT reported on Tuesday. It is now a year since people belonging to this group received their first booster shot.

Last month, the company said in a statement that it had “initiated development of variant specific vaccines for Covid in an attempt to be future ready.”

Moderna has a bivalent vaccine in the US that acts against the original strain and the BA.4 and BA.5 sub-strains of the Omicron variant of the virus.

Bharat Biotech also announced last year that along with Switzerland’s ExcellGene SA and University of Sydney it was going to develop a variant-proof SARS-CoV-2 vaccine that was being funded through CEPI (the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations).

CEPI announced an award under its $200m programme launched in March 2021, to advance the development of vaccines that provide broad protection against SARS-Cov-2 variants and other betacoronaviruses.

The coalition will provide funding of up to US$19.3 million to support the development of the vaccine candidate to the consortium, according to its statement.

“…The consortium partnership strives to advance a new vaccine concept that confers highly cross-reactive protection against numerous SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern (VoCs) as well as other Betacoronaviruses. ExcellGene will produce complex chimeric Spike antigens using its engineered CHOExpress-cell based technology. The Swiss company will use insights from several scientific and technical disciplines along with artificial intelligence to identify the most promising antigenic structure,” said the statement issued in July last year.