While the global number of coronavirus cases have crossed the 14 million mark, India continues to remain the third worst-hit country with over 11 lakh positive cases. Top level medical organizations and research agencies are working hard to develop a vaccine to put an end to the spread of the deadly virus. In the race to develop the vaccine, our domestic pharmaceutical firms are not far behind. It was reported earlier that a total of seven firms have already started to work on developing the vaccine across India.
As per media reports, on Saturday, India's first experimental Covid-19 vaccine candidate ‘Covaxin’ was given approval by the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) Ethics Committee to conduct human clinical trials. The Drug Control General of India (DCGI) had just recently given the indigenous vaccine candidate a nod for conducting human trials. Covaxin has been developed by Hyderabad-based pharma firm Bharat Biotech in partnership with the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and the National Institute of Virology (NIV).
The human clinical trials have begun from today at AIIMS Delhi, which is one of the 12 sites approved by the ICMR. As per reports, a total of 375 volunteers were listed for the clinical trial, and out of these, the AIIMs will select 100 participants for the phase-1 and phase-2 trails. The rest of the volunteers will be sent over to different sites for the trials. AIIMS Patna and some other sites are also included in the list for the trials.
Along with Bharat Biotech's Covaxin, the DCGI has also given approval to pharma company Zydus Cadila to conduct phase-1 and phase-2 clinical trials for its Covid-19 vaccine candidate ZyCoV-D. If these clinical human trials are a great success, there may be a good chance for the country to finally reduce the spread of the deadly virus and lean towards normalcy.
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