Hyderabad-based Biological E’s Corbevax created in US
Hyderabad: The Corbevax vaccine for Covid-19, which recently received Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA) from Indian drug regulators and is being manufactured by Hyderabad-based pharma giant Biological E Limited, has a direct link to top vaccine researchers of United States, who had created, engineered and technology-transferred the vaccine without any patents or strings attached.
Led by noted vaccine researchers Dr Maria Elena Bottazzi and Dr Peter Hotez, who are the co-directors of Texas Children’s Hospital Centre for Vaccine Development (CVD), the technology behind Corbevax was developed at Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine.
Dubbed as ‘The World’s Covid-19 Vaccine’, Corbevax utilises a traditional recombinant protein-based technology that enables its production at large scales, which makes it widely accessible to inoculate the global population, Dr Peter Hotez and Dr Maria Elena Bottazzi said.
“We technology transferred our vaccine and helped in its co-development with BioE with no patent and no strings attached. As a result, it should be the least expensive Covid vaccine available yet. This vaccine can be made locally all over the world, and we’ve now technology transferred our Texas Children’s vaccine to producers in India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Botswana,” Dr Peter Hotez said in a tweet.
The top vaccine researcher pointed out that that the Texas Children’s Centre does not have plans to make money out of the vaccine and it’s a gift to the world. Corbevax was an effort of a team of over 20 scientists at Texas Children’s and Baylor College. “The initiative was co-led by me and my brilliant science partner for the last 20 years Dr Maria Elena Bottazzi,” Dr Peter said.
The initial construct and production process of the vaccine antigen was developed at Texas Children’s Hospital CVD, led by Dr Maria Elena Bottazzi and Dr Peter and in-licensed from BCM Ventures, Baylor College of Medicine’s integrated commercialization team, to Hyderabad-based vaccine and pharmaceutical company Biological E Limited (BE).
“Protein-based vaccines have been widely used to prevent many other diseases, have proven safety records, and use economies of scale to achieve low-cost scalability across the world,” said Dr Maria.
“Our decade-long studies advancing coronavirus vaccine prototypes have led to the creation of this vaccine, which will fill the access gap created by the more expensive, newer vaccine technologies and that today are still not able to be quickly scaled for global production,” Dr Peter and Dr Maria said.
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