COVID-19 tales: ‘Our scientists brought live virus from Pune by road’

Maker Of Indiarsquos First Indigenous Covid19 VaccineDr Krishna Ella 51 HyderabadChairman and managing director Bharat Biotech International LimitedBorn in a farmerrsquos family I decided to study agriculture and wanted to be a farmer But I became a molecular biology scientist In the year 1996 I returned from the US where I had gone on a scholarship ready to take entrepreneurial risksMy journey began as the head of a startup in 1995 when I conceptualised a Hepatitis vaccine an unmet need in India and successfully delivered the vaccine at 1 Since then we have delivered over four billion doses of vaccines in over 123 countries with a portfolio of 145 global patents Our manufacturing facilities are approved by USFDA United States Food and Drug Administration KFDA Korea Food amp Drug Administration and WHO World Health Organisation Today we are also proud to have the first Biosafety Level 3 production facility in the worldThe inspiration to return to India and do something for the motherland came from my mother and my wife Suchitra The years I spent at the University of WisconsinMadison US were inspiring Listening to thoughtprovoking lectures by the National Science Academy winners and Nobel laureates nurtured my strength as a scientist I also realised that if we have to deliver the benefits of science to society I had to become an entrepreneur with a differencemdashI had to be innovativeIrsquove always believed that science can be leveraged to solve public health problems My mission is to identify neglected diseases that impact the developing world and find solutions for themSo when the pandemic struck last year I was confident that we can develop a Made In India vaccine with our years of knowledge in developing viral bacterial and recombinant vaccinesCOVAXIN is whollyindigenous developed under publicprivate partnership and built on a vaccine platform technology that has established its safety and efficacy for several yearsOur initial days were hugely challenging right from the time we sent our scientists who took great risks to bring the live virus from Pune by road Our 2500 employees worked under extreme pressure as we were in complete lockdown and were also racing against timeFrom the very start our mission was to develop an indigenous vaccine that is safe efficacious and will be a universal solution to fight the pandemic COVAXIN is a highly purified and inactivated twodose SARSCoV2 vaccine manufactured in a Vero cell manufacturing platform with an excellent safety track record of more than 300 million dosesThere were concerns regarding the safety of our vaccine But Irsquod like to tell everyone that we focused on conducting the studies under the strictest clinical trial protocols mandated by the world and the Indian Ministry of Health We also ensured that the clinical trials were done by a third party The outcome of our preclinical trials and our Phase 1 2 and 3 trials has proven that our vaccine is safe and efficacious Also analysis from the National Institute of Virology indicates that vaccineinduced antibodies can neutralise the UK variant strains and other heterologous strainsThe development of COVAXIN is a matter of great pride for us not just at Bharat Biotech but also for our country and humanity As a company we believe in the scientific rigour of what we do as it affects the lives our patients1Cost at which he sold the Hepatitis vaccine in 1995