Race hots up for Indian vaccine

Volunteers across India are being administered the indigenous vaccine candidates against the coronavirus disease developed by Bharat Biotech International Limited (BBIL) and Zydus Cadila.

BBIL and Zydus were granted permission for Phase I and II clinical trials of Covaxin and ZyCoV-D respectively.

A third vaccine candidate, developed by Oxford University, is soon to be tested in India. Serum Institute, which is in a manufacturing partnership with the UK's Astra Zeneca, has said it will begin human trials as soon as it receives regulatory approval.

BBIL's Covaxin, developed in collaboration with the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and the National Institute of Virology (NIV), will be tested at 12 hospitals — including AIIMS, Delhi and Patna, and PGI Rohtak — in 12 cities. The first phase will involve over 500 volunteers, all healthy and between the ages of 18 and 55 with no co-morbidities.

Testing of Zydus's candidate, ZyCoV-D, is currently limited to its research centre in Ahmedabad, but will be extended to multiple cities.

Covaxin trials have already begun in Hyderabad, Patna, Kancheepuram, Rohtak, and now Delhi, to be followed by Nagpur, Bhubaneshwar, Belgaum, Gorakhpur, Kanpur, Goa and Visakhapatnam.

All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) Delhi administered its first dose of Bharat Biotech's vaccine candidate to a 30-year-old healthy man on Friday as part of its combined phase 1 and 2 trials for the drug.

Dr Sanjay Rai, principal investigator of the vaccine trial project at AIIMS, Delhi, told TOI, "We observed him (the 30-year-old subject) for two hours. There was no immediate side-effect." He said the volunteer has been allowed to go home for now and he will be examined again after two days.

AIIMS Patna, which started human trials of Covaxin on 11 volunteers on July 15, has not encountered any major side-effects in volunteers. The results of the first dose are yet to come in.

The Post-Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences (PGIMS) in Rohtak has readied 20 volunteers and administered the first dose to three people on July 17.

State nodal officer Dhruva Chaudhary said Rohtak's PGIMS and Patna's AIIMS have enrolled 20 subjects each so far.

"None of the 20 volunteers showed any adverse impact of the vaccine. We are planning to start the second phase of human trials soon," he added. Dr Savita Verma, the trial's principal investigator at the institute, said the first batch is to be given a second dose on July 31.

Human trials at SRM Medical College Hospital and Research Centre in Kancheepuram, near Chennai, began on Thursday with two volunteers being administered 0.05 ml of the vaccine each. They will get the next dose on day 14.

Nagpur's Gillurkar Multispecialty Hospital and Research Centre, the only site for human trials of Covaxin in Maharashtra, is expected to start Phase 1 by "July-end or latest in the first week of August", said Dr Chandrashekhar Gillurkar, the centre's director.

Bhubaneswar's Institute of Medical Sciences and Sum Hospital, a privately-run medical college, started screening prospective candidates on July 20. The actual administering of the vaccine will take some more days as the volunteer's blood samples are being sent to Delhi, said E Venkata Rao, principal investigator in the trial.

About 60 volunteers from West Bengal have applied for the Phase I trial in Bhubaneswar, while a few have also applied for trials in AIIMS, New Delhi.

Clinical trials are yet to begin at Jeevan Rekha, a multispecialty hospital in Belgaum, about 450 km from Bengaluru, where Covaxin will be tested on around 200 healthy volunteers in and around Belgaum.

In Hyderabad, two young male volunteers aged below 30 years were given vaccine doses at the Nizam's Institute of Medical on Monday. A third volunteer (from at least 60) will be given a shot in the next two days.

Eleven volunteers from Goa received doses of Covaxin in Phase I starting at 10:00 am yesterday.

Gorakhpur's Rana Hospital and Trauma Centre is waiting for the vaccine to start human trials. "We are ready with volunteers but we have not yet confirmed how many vaccines are coming to us. We'll start as soon as the vaccine reaches us," the hospital's chief administrative officer, Venketesh Chaturvedi, said.