COVAXIN: India’s First Indigenous COVID-19 Vaccine Candidate To Begin Human Trials Next Week

India's first indigenous COVID-19 vaccine candidate -- COVAXIN -- is going to begin the human trials next week, testing it on 375 individuals in the first phase, Times Now reported.

The potential vaccine has been developed by Bharat Biotech in collaboration with Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and National Institute of Virology (NIV), Pune. The vaccine, as per the report, is to be tested on over 1,100 people in the two phases of clinical trials.

The inactivated vaccine, last week, got approval from the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) to conduct the clinical trials. The experimental vaccine was derived from a strain of Sars-CoV-2 (medical name of the novel coronavirus), which was isolated at NIV, Pune and later handed over to the Hyderabad-based Bharat Biotech.

The company plans to take 375 people for the first phase of the trials and 750 more individuals in the second phase, an ICMR spokesperson was cited in a Bloomberg report. The last date of registration for first phase of human trials has been set 13 July.

It should also be noted that the company is simultaneously also engaged in the development of another vaccine called 'Coroflu' which is being developed in a collaboration with the University of Wisconsin-Madison and vaccine maker FluGen.

Meanwhile, there are other vaccine candidates as well which are being developed in India by companies like Zydus Cadila, Serum Institute of India and Panacea Biotec. While Ahmedabad-based Zydus Cadila's candidate ZyCoV-D has received DCGI's nod for clinical trials, others are still in pre-clinical stage.