US-based BCM ties up with India’s’ BE for COVID-19 immunization production

US-based BCM ties up with India’s’ BE for COVID-19 immunization production

Overview

  • Post By : Kumar Jeetendra

  • Source: PTI

  • Date: 28 Aug,2020

Houston, Aug 28 (PTI) At the race to discover a cure for its coronavirus infection, Texas-based Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) has entered into a licensing arrangement with Indian pharmaceutical company Biological E Limited (BE) for the growth of a secure, effective and inexpensive vaccine.

The business engaged in licence negotiations with all the BCM Ventures group after first discussions on Baylor”s engineering and the way that it could possibly inform a vaccine to address the current worldwide pandemic.

The company will leverage its previous experience for its further development and commercialisation of this vaccine candidate, that is currently produced using an established yeast-based expression technology, the Texas-based BCM said.

“Recent information which India has come to be the third-leading nation in terms of COVID-19 instances has triggered concern that COVID-19 will get widespread and a severe and deadly infection across the crowded metropolitan regions of South Asia,” explained Dr Peter Hotez, professor and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor, at a webinar organised from the Consul General of India in Houston, Aseem Mahajan, weekly.

India has recorded 33,87,500 coronavirus instances and 61,529 fatalities due to the illness, while the US is directing the chart with more than 5,869,000 cases and 180,800 deaths.

“The healthcare industry is known to grow in India and the United States. Considering that the complementarities, companies in both the nations have a great chance to build synergies including to partner together for international supply chains, joint research and manufacturing,” Mahajan told PTI.

Hotez and his coworkers have already been producing SARs and MERS vaccines.

“Then, when we got word roughly COVID-19, we saw the arrangement for the new virus was comparable to a number of the viruses that we were making vaccines ” said Hotez, who is also the co-director of Texas Children”s Centre for Vaccine Development.

Hotez and his staff had the ability to swiftly proceed to making a COVID-19 vaccine, which led to the cooperation with a large vaccine manufacturer in India.

“They have the capability to make a billion gallons of the vaccine that we”ve grown at Baylor College of Medicine.

“We”re very worried that lots of the middle and low income countries will probably be sort of pushed aside if we only rely on the Operation Warp Rate vaccines therefore we believe that which we do at Texas Children”s and Baylor should fill that seriously significant gap,” he said.

The vaccine remains in trials in India together with the hope that it will have the ability to roll out sometime next year.

“For the last two decades, our vaccine center has been advancing global health vaccines to stop neglected and emerging diseases,” said associate dean Dr Maria Elena Bottazzi.

“We are so well suited to embark on this important collaboration with BE and look forward to facilitating the technology transfer for the COVID-19 vaccine to India and also for the world. The present focus is on transport of the technologies for BE to commence scale-up of this production process and undertake further evolution of the vaccine candidate,” she said.

The BE in a statement said the partnership with Baylor would help hasten the development of an inexpensive vaccine, particularly for India and other non – and middle-income states.

“When the vaccine development is more effective, we expect to create a few hundred thousand doses of the vaccine available annually,” said Narender Dev Mantena, director of BioE Holdings Inc, who heads BE”s book vaccine initiative.

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