Close on the heels of getting emergency use authorisation for its COVID-19 vaccine Corbevax, from the Drugs Controller General of India, Biological E has announced plans to ramp up production.
The vaccine maker said it plans to complete production of the vaccine at a rate of 75 million doses per month and anticipates to touch more than 100 million doses per month from February.
“These capacities will enable delivery of 300 million doses as promised to the government of India,” the Hyderabad-based company said in a release on Tuesday. It, however, did not specify from when the vaccine would become part of the national vaccination programme nor the price of a dose.
Biological E said there are also plans to soon deliver more than one billion additional doses globally of the vaccine, which has been developed in collaboration with Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and Baylor College of Medicine (Baylor) in Houston, Texas, it said.
India’s first indigenously developed protein sub-unit COVID-19 vaccine, Corbevax is a “recombinant protein sub-unit” vaccine developed from a component of the spike protein on the virus’s surface, which helps the body build the immune response against the virus.
Managing Director Mahima Datla said, “Over the years, we have worked to make quality vaccines and pharmaceutical products accessible to families around the world. With this as our backdrop, we resolved to develop an affordable and effective COVID-19 vaccine. It has now become a reality.”
Thanking Prime Minister Narendra Modi for making vaccination a national mission, she said, “his vision and the advance commitments we received towards Corbevax were instrumental in our ability to scale-up and manufacture at such huge capacities.”
The vaccine will be effective both in scale and affordability, providing sustainable access to low-and middle-income countries, she said.
Biological E said it has completed two Phase III clinical trials for Corbevax involving more than 3,000 subjects in the 18-80 age group at 33 study sites across India. The vaccine was found to be safe, well tolerated and immunogenic.
