Hyderabad: The pioneering biotechnology company, Bharat Biotech, based out of Hyderabad in an announcement on Friday said that it has started the project to develop human antibodies for COVID-19 therapy supported by CSIR-NMITLI.
The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) under its New Millennium Indian Technology Leadership Initiative (NMITLI) has sanctioned a project to develop human monoclonal antibodies as a treatment for COVID-19 infections. The project will be captained by Bharat Biotech, the leading manufacturer of vaccines and bio-therapeutics which exports its products to over 65 countries.
“We are fast-tracking the development process, to make the antibodies available within the next 6 months and thus improve the treatment efficacy,” said Dr. Krishna Ella, Chairman and Managing Director, Bharat Biotech.
He said while both Israel and Netherlands recently announced the development of virus-neutralizing antibodies, their approach would be to develop a powerful cocktail of neutralizing antibodies that can also simultaneously block mutational variants of the virus capable of neutralizing SARS-CoV2.
“Although efforts are underway for the development of drugs and vaccines for controlling the Covid-19 pandemic, these are slow and expensive processes with uncertainties. Therefore, an alternate therapeutic regimen for early deployment is critical,” Bharat Biotech said in a statement.
Bharat Biotech chairman Krishna Ella said: “The purpose of vaccination is to protect the healthy against future infections and it alone may not provide the complete solution. We feel monoclonal antibody therapy will provide a viable option. The question is of how to treat those individuals who are already infected? Plus, we do not yet know how effective an anti-SARS-CoV2 vaccine will be in elderly people and those with co-morbidities. Given the large number of Indians suffering from hypertension, diabetes and heart diseases, this becomes an important issue.”
This project clubs the National Centre for Cell Science (NCCS), Pune, Indian Institute of Technology, Indore, PredOmix Technologies and Bharat Biotech in a collaborative approach for a public health emergency. Although efforts are underway for the development of drugs and vaccines for controlling the COVID-19 pandemic, these are slow and expensive processes with uncertainties. Therefore, an alternate therapeutic regimen for early deployment is critical, Bharat Biotech said.
Ella said plasma therapy has proved to be useful but the intrinsic issues correlated with this method greatly limit its role and wider use. Large-scale deployment of plasma therapy is limited by the availability of plasma. “There is also a challenge in carefully screening convalescent plasma for the presence of other infections that could be unwittingly transferred to the recipient,” he said.
Bharat Biotech is also trying to develop and test a vaccine against COVID-19 called CoroFlu as part of an international collaboration of virologists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and vaccine companies FluGen. CoroFlu is a one drop COVID-19 nasal vaccine built on a flu vaccine “backbone” that has been shown to be safe and well-tolerated in humans, in Phase I and Phase II clinical trials, according to the vaccine maker.
