Delhi-based Panacea Biotec has bagged the opportunity to fulfill the country?s requirement for bivalent oral polio vaccine.
The company with an annual turnover of more than Rs 800 crore would be the sole supplier of the new vaccine to the government, which is being used for the first time in the national polio campaign. In this round a total of 25 lakh children in Bihar would be inoculated with the new vaccine.
Overall 170 million children are likely to be immunised.
Rajesh Jain, joint managing director, Panacea Biotec confirmed the development. ?We are the only player meeting the whole demand of the bivalent oral polio vaccines in the country at present,? Jain said.
Although, currently, the size of the contract seems limited, considering that government is using the vaccine only in a fraction of its total immunisation drive, Panacea?s fortunes could mount in times to come as other polio afflicted countries make the transition to the bivalent form of vaccine in their mass immunisation drives under WHO?s guidance. In Afghanistan, for instance the use of bivalent in mass polio eradication campaign has already started. Panacea is one of the five players that includes Europe?s largest drugmaker GSK which are internationally licensed to manufacture the bivalent form of oral polio vaccine. Also the use of the vaccine is being rolled out in a phased manner in the high-risk areas in the country. From the next round of immunisation the new vaccine would also be administered in UP.
The government spends close to Rs 1,290 crore annually in the polio eradication programme, which has now been integrated with the National Rural Health Mission. According to rough estimates, around 50% of this allocation goes into buying the vaccines.
Earlier, the bivalent vaccine was tested on more than 900 newborn children in multiple sites like Indore, Chennai and Pune last year. Following the successful clinical trials, the use of bivalent oral polio vaccine was recommended by the India Advisory Group in Polio Eradication in place of the monovalent oral polio vaccine. Of the three strains of wild poliovirus, P1, P2 & P3, Type 2 wild polio virus (P2) was declared by WHO to have been eliminated globally by the year 1999. Following this many countries switched to use of monovalent vaccines to counter the two prevailing viruses.
However, some independent voices are critical of the transition on the account that population immunity to type 2 poliovirus is weakened. The current strategy of the Centre entails eliminating more virulent among the existing types that is P1 while keeping P3 under control. Till now, monovalent vaccine? MOPV1 and MOPV 3 were used in the programme to handle type 1 and type3 wild poliovirus in the high-risk areas. While the monovalent vaccine was found to be effective in containing transmission of P1, control on transmission of P3 was found compromised amid the fresh outbreak of Type 3 poliovirus in pockets.
