Centre says Bharat Biotech ready to share Covaxin technology to ramp up production

The Centre on Thursday said that Bharat Biotech, the Hyderabad-based manufacturer of Covaxin, is willing to share the vaccine technology with other companies for scaling up the production of the homegrown shot against Covid-19, provided such companies have the required facilities to handle a live virus.

"People say that Covaxin should be given to other companies for manufacturing. I am happy to say that the Covaxin manufacturing company (Bharat Biotech) has welcomed this when we discussed it with them. In this vaccine, a live virus is inactivated and this is done only in BSL3 labs. Not every company has this,” V K Paul, NITI Ayog member said in a press conference.

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“We give an open invitation to companies who want to do this. The companies that want to manufacture Covaxin, should do it together. The Centre will assist them so that the capacity is increased.”

The bottleneck was the non-availability of biosafety level-3 laboratories in most of the vaccine manufacturing companies. “If the companies are willing to set up such a facility for local manufacture of covaxin, they are welcome. The government will support them,” he said.

The indigenous vaccine is being manufactured by Bharat Biotech using a strain isolated and characterised by the National Institute of Virology, Pune, one of the constituent laboratories of the ICMR.

Paul said Bharat Biotech had committed to increase its vaccine production from one crore to 10 crore on its own. Subsequently, the production would rise to upwards of 50 crore when manufacturing would begin at four other production units.

The Centre has decided to invest more than Rs 130 crore to enhance Covaxin production capacities at four new sites - Bharat Biotech’s new unit in Bengaluru, Haffkine Biopharmaceutical Corporation in Mumbai, Indian Immunologicals at Hyderabad and Bharat Immunologicals and Biologicals Limited, Bulandshahr. The funds will come from the Department of Biotechnology.