Bharat Biotech joins global efforts in developing coronavirus vaccine

CoroFlu will build on the backbone of vaccine firm FluGen's flu vaccine candidate, a self-limiting version of the influenza virus that induces an immune response against the flu.

Hyderabad-based vaccine maker Bharat Biotech said today that it was a part of an international collaboration of virologists and vaccine companies that has begun working on the development and testing CoroFlu, of a unique intranasal vaccine against Covid-19.

CoroFlu will build on the backbone of vaccine company FluGen's flu vaccine candidate known as M2SR, which  is a self-limiting version of the influenza virus that induces an immune response against the flu. FluGen's lab will insert gene sequences from SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes Covid-10, into M2SR sot that the new vaccine will also induce immunity against the pathogen.

Sharing the details of the collaboration, Raches Ella, head, business development at Bharat Biotech said, "Bharat Biotech will manufacture the vaccine, conduct clinical trials, and prepare to produce almost 300 million does of vaccine for global distribution. Under the collaboration agreement, FluGen will transfer its existing manufacturing processes to Bharat Biotech to enable the vaccine for clinical trials.

Refinement of the CoroFlu vaccine concept and testing in laboratory animal models at UW-Madison is expected to take 3-6 months. Bharat Biotech in Hyderabad will then begin production scale-up for safety and efficacy testing in humans. CoroFlu could be in human clinical trials by the fall of 2020, the company said.

"We are going to modify M2SR by adding part of the coding region for the coronavirus spike protein that the virus uses to latch on to cells and begin infection," said FluGen co-founder Gabriele Neumann, a senior virologist in Kawaoka's laboratory. According to him, M2SR is a unique form of the flue virus as it lacks a gene called M2, which restricts the virus to undergoing only a single round of replication in cells.