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: year, two million deaths are averted through immunisation, says a recent World Health Organisation (WHO) report, stressing with continued vaccine developments, four to five million annual deaths could be prevented by 2015.

After all, the statistics on vaccine preventable diseases like cholera, malaria, tuberculosis (TB) and typhoid are astounding. These diseases kill 1.9 million children annually. Around 2,000 million are infected by TB, another 2,400 million are affected by malaria and every day, there are 15,000 new AIDS infections.

At present, paediatric vaccines account for almost two-thirds of the global vaccine sales. Going forward, this segment will loose its share to the adult, therapeutic and influenza vaccine segments. After all, the battle against infectious diseases is far from over. We have witnessed a growing number of new diseases emerging in the past couple of years. Both the contemporary Sars and bird flu have been active all over the world. However, several challenges still remain, one of the biggest being the wide gap between the developed and the developing world in terms of accessibility and quality of vaccines.

According to a recent Frost & Sullivan report, the developed markets in North America, Europe and Japan account for almost 80% of the global vaccine market. However, there is a set of emerging markets such as Africa, Asia (India and China in particular) and Latin America which are fast becoming the backbone for the growth of global vaccines market. Developing and under developed markets in these regions are being given a higher level of importance by WHO and Pan-American Health Organisation (PAHO) to control several diseases by effective immunisation. And, the funding for vaccination programmes in these markets is drawn from developed markets, which indirectly subsidise the cost of vaccines.

For the Indian vaccine makers, not only is there a real opportunity to tap these emerging markets, they could also ramp up their research and development (R&D) pipeline by attracting billions of dollars of funding that are going into developing vaccines. One of the ways they are doing this is by focusing their efforts on biotech vaccines, which vaccine makers claim to be superior to the conventional ones.