Zydus Cadila likely to launch COVID-19 vaccine by March 2021: Report

Zydus Cadila will apply for Phase 3 clinical trials of its experimental COVID-19 vaccine in December, and expects to launch it by March 2021.

"If all goes well, the company expects to introduce the vaccine by March next year," a source told The Economic Times.

Moneycontrol could not independently verify the story.

Zydus Cadila will submit results of the Phase 2 trials next week, which "will ascertain the safety, dose and efficacy of the potential vaccine", a source told The Economic Times.

Initial results from the Phase 2 trials indicate that ZyCoV-D, the company's vaccine candidate, that no safety concerns were observed, the report said.

According to the report, the company is looking to conduct Phase 3 trials of the vaccine against COVID-19 on 39,000 participants.

Also read: How India's ecosystem is gearing up for a smooth rollout of COVID-19 vaccines

"The indications are safe and the trial is under control," a source told the paper.

"We could be looking at manufacturing 100 million doses to begin with, once the vaccine receives all regulatory permissions," Zydus Cadila Chairman Pankaj R Patel recently told The Economic Times.

Zydus Cadila is also exploring collaborations if required to make the vaccine more widely available, the report said.

Vaccine candidates by Pfizer-BioNTech, Oxford-AstraZenca, Moderna and Russia's Sputnik have recently reported strong efficacy in protecting people against the disease.

US drugmaker Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech said there vaccine candidate has an efficay of 95 percent, while Moderna said its potential vaccine has 94.5 percent efficacy.

British-Swedish drugmaker AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford have said there experimental vaccine on average protected 70 percent of the trials' participants against COVID-19.