In some positive development, Indian pharmaceutical company, Zydus Cadila received the green signal from The Drug Controller General of India (DGCI) to start phase I and II of their clinical trials on human participants.
With over 10 million cases reported globally, over 110 independent scientific bodies are in contention to find a potential COVID-19 vaccine. Over 7 vaccines are being researched in India and just this week, two candidate groups have been given the go-ahead to start human clinical trials for their prototypes.
The news comes just after India’s first homegrown vaccine, Bharat Biotech’s COVAXIN received the approvals to start with their clinical trials.
While India is one of the leading vaccine producers and suppliers in the world and it takes a lot of time for a vaccine to pass through stages, trials are being done in a speedy way across the world to meet the surge of the pandemic that has caused widescale destruction.
A report mentioned that Ahmedabad based Zydus Cadila saw satisfactory results in the pre-clinical trials and various animal studies, post which, the regulatory board issued them the go-ahead to start the trials.
The vaccine approval process was accelerated after recommendation by the subject expert committee on COVID-19.
“The company has submitted data to DCGI based on animal trial, they conducted. Animals like- mice, rabbits, guinea pigs, rats were used and these animals developed antibodies against the virus,” mentions an agency report.
Interestingly, pharmaceutical giant, Cadila Healthcare has been in the news for ramping up its research on not one but two coronavirus vaccine candidates as well as the production of hydroxychloroquine, or HCQ drug to fight COVID-19.
A research program for developing a steady vaccine has been done in collaboration with multiple teams across India and Europe.
One of their prime vaccine candidates deals with the development of a DNA vaccine against the coronavirus membrane protein which would subsequently work by encouraging a strong immune response and root away viral cells. The other vaccine candidate makes use of a live measles virus strain against COVID-19 to spruce up the production of antibodies and provides protection.
The news comes after it has been said that the efficacy studies from phase I and II of the COVAXIN trials will be available by August 15. The vaccine is being modelled with an inactive version of the deadly SARS-COV2 virus and has been showing promising and safe results so far.
These are the only two vaccine prototypes which have been approved for the testing phase so far. While over seven other candidates are developing their vaccine models, Patanjali group’s ‘Coronil’, marketed as a COVID-19 cure has only been approved by the officials as an immunity booster, after a lot of murky trials.
Apart from this, global candidates like Moderna Inc.’s mRNA 1273, CanSino BioTech’s SinoVac and Oxford-Astrazeneca’s ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 are currently in advanced stages of human trials.