Bharat Biotech: More than just Covaxin
As the story goes, the couple who were settled in the US, with successful careers, decided one fine morning in 1996 to return to India and help in its development. Krishna surrendered his American passport, the couple sold their house and put that money into starting Bharat Biotech with a seed capital of $3.5 million.
He’s simple and warm, with no airs whatsoever for a person who founded and heads a company that has supplied about 10 billion doses of different vaccines to 123 countries in the world, and crucially, is at the forefront of India’s fight against the Covid-19 pandemic.
The company chose to take the difficult route of producing an inactivated virus vaccine.
It is not just complicated technology but also more expensive to produce and time-consuming. Yet, Ella chose this because of his conviction that inactivated virus vaccines are superior to mRNA or adeno virus vaccines.
“We wanted to focus on both humoral and cell mediated responses, against not just spike proteins but also the nucleocapsid proteins which have also been determined to be immunogenic.
Nucleocapsid proteins are known to be more stable and develop less variants, as seen with spike proteins. Our long experience in developing other inactivated virus vaccines helped us.
The adjuvant in Covaxin triggers T-cell responses,” says Ella.
Unlike mRNA vaccines that
induce the body to produce the antigen of interest, inactivated virus vaccines give a
readymade antigen to stimulate the immune response. Not just this, Bharat Biotech selected 6 micrograms as the dosage even though 3 micrograms worked as well during Phase I/II trials, because the company wanted to be abundantly cautious.
https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/spe...684598.ece