India gears up to mass-produce H1N1 flu vaccine

India has decided to go ahead with mass scale production of a vaccine against H1N1 influenza as soon as it receives the seed stock, which is a strain of the virus on which the vaccine is based. 

In a meeting among the Indian Council of Medical Research, health ministry officials and vaccine manufacturers like Serum Institute, Panacea, Bharat Biotech and Sanofi yesterday, it was decided that the centre would immediately ask the World Health Organisation and the Centre for Disease Control, Atlanta to send the seed stock for companies to develop the technology to create the vaccine before the world is possibly hit by a second wave of the H1N1 pandemic.

Marie Paule Kieny, the WHO's director of the Initiative for Vaccine Research, had recently said that the seed will be available to manufacturers by the second half of May. 

Indian Council of Medical research director-general V M Katoch, who is also secretary, department of health research, chaired the meeting. He has reportedly said the government would hold another meeting in 10 days to constitute a core team to begin research work on the vaccine. By then, companies too have been asked to "prepare their manufacturing plans and their intent on how much they can manufacture and in how much time".

"We will ask Indian vaccine manufacturers to comply to WHO's good manufacturing practices standards so that they too can manufacture the vaccine," Katoch said. 

According to WHO, a vaccine against H1N1 flu may be tested on people in a couple of months. Creating an effective vaccine would take between four and six months time. 

No effective vaccine is presently available against the new influenza A H1N1 virus. Scientific evidence suggests that the already available seasonal influenza vaccines confer little or no protection against H1N1.

Though no case of H1N1 flu has been reported in India so far, the government, at Tuesday's high-level meeting, chalked out a scientific framework for manufacturing a vaccine for the dreaded disease.  

The meeting, chaired by Katoch, was attended by members of the National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD), the serum institute and representatives of the World Health Organisation, besides drug manufacturing companies. 

"We have decided to form a short-term and a long-term strategy for tackling the dreaded disease," Katoch told PTI. While the short-term strategy would include a plan of action to tackle the outbreak of a pandemic, like the one this year, the long-term plan would focus on creation of a vaccine and vaccination of a select population, he said.