An international vaccine development coalition has agreed to give $ 12.5 million to Panacea Biotech and Translational Health Science and Technology Institute (THSTI) under the Union government to develop a vaccine against multiple betacoronaviruses to address future pandemics.
Betacoronaviruses have caused three major pandemics in the recent history: the SARS pandemic in 2001, MERS pandemic that led to disease outbreaks in 2012, 2015 and 2018 and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), has announced the latest award under its $200-million programme, launched in March last year, to advance the development of vaccines that provide broad protection against SARS-Cov-2 variants and other betacoronaviruses.
Panacea said in a statement that the funding has been announced to develop vaccine candidates that could provide broad protection against SARS-Cov-2 variants and other betacoronaviruses.
“CEPI will provide funding of up to $12.5m to support the development of multi-epitope, nanoparticle-based vaccine candidates and advance the manufacturing process,” said the statement. “
“Through this research programme, THSTI and Panacea Biotec will design and select the lead antigen through proof-of-concept preclinical studies, and undertake initial clinical development through phase I/II studies as they seek to establish clinical proof of concept for novel vaccine candidates to provide broad protection against MERS, SARS-CoV, SARS-CoV-2 and its variants.”
Phase I/II clinical studies to assess the safety and efficacy of the vaccine candidate are likely to take about 15-18 months to complete.
Consortium partners THSTI and Panacea Biotec are using a novel technology platform with highly immunogenic antigens and the data from preclinical studies indicate that the vaccine platform induces both humoral and cellular mediated immune responses.
If the platform is proven to be successful, it could potentially be used to enable rapid development of vaccines against disease X – unknown pathogens with pandemic potential that have yet to emerge, the company claimed.
The nanoparticle based antigen has been prepared using THSTI’s—an autonomous institute under the department of biotechnology—propriety platform and contains conserved pieces of virus that are present in all coronaviruses and resist changes despite mutation.
The firm also said that the vaccine is highly scalable and affordable and millions of its doses can be produced every month, as and when required and added that there is potential for further funding until commercialisation of the vaccine.
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