Haffkine Bio-Pharmaceutical Corporation is unlikely to roll out its first batch of Covaxin before May next year. Work is currently happening on the detailing of the bio-safety level III laboratory, and the lab is expected to be completed by January 2022, according to media reports.
A report in Times of India quotes Subhash Shankarwar, general manager of production at Haffkine saying that the lab will be built under the monitoring of scientists of ICMR and Haffkine and will undergo a month-long testing phase, before becoming operational.
Shankarwar also added that after the lab is validated, three batches will be produced and tested, for a period of three months, and only after everything goes well, the vaccine production will start. The timeline that Haffkine is currently looking at shows that the production may begin in April, and the vaccine is likely to be available in the markets by May.
Haffkine Biopharma, a state-owned company in Maharashtra, announced on June 2 that it aims to produce 22.8 crore (228 million) doses of Covaxin in a year. Under a technology transfer agreement with Bharat Biotech, Mumbai-based Haffkine will manufacture Covaxin. Haffkine has received a grant of Rs 65 crore from the Centre and Rs 94 crore from the Maharashtra government, both of which will be used to build a BSL-3 facility for manufacturing and purchasing raw materials, media reports had previously claimed.
Three other public sector undertakings (PSUs) — Indian Immunologicals and Bharat Immunologicals & Biologicals, Bulandshaharand and Gujarat Covid Vaccine Consortium (GCVC) — had previously entered into technology transfer agreements with Bharat Biotech to produce Covaxin.
By the end of the year, Bharat Biotech expects to increase Covaxin’s capacity from 10-12 million doses per month to around 700 million doses.
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