Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications
Friday, Nov 11, 2005
Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications Friday, Nov 11, 2005 |
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Alliances & Joint Ventures Acambis inks pact with Bharat Bio for Japanese Encephalitis vaccine Our Bureau
Hyderabad , Nov. 10 ACAMBIS Plc, the £81.5-million, NASDAQ-listed vaccines major, has entered into a manufacturing and marketing arrangement with Bharat Biotech International Ltd (BBIL) for `ChimeriVax-JE,' an investigational vaccine against Japanese Encephalitis (JE). Announcing this here on Wednesday, the BBIL Executive/Founder Director, Ms Suchitra K. Ella, said Acambis was preparing to commence phase-III clinical trials of a single-dose regimen of its ChimeriVax-JE vaccine candidate in India by the year-end. Having completed phase-II clinical testing on the vaccine candidate, Acambis expects to launch the product in India by June next, its Marketing Director, Mr Mick Garstang, told newspersons from London through videoconferencing. Under the agreement with Acambis, BBIL would be responsible for end-stage fill/finish processing of ChimeriVax-JE at its facilities in India. Once the vaccine is approved, the company would market and distribute it in the Indian subcontinent, BBIL President, Dr Krishna Mohan, said. The bulk vaccine will be manufactured at Acambis' Massachusetts (US) facility, where material for phase-III testing was already being produced following technology transfer and scale-up to commercial scale manufacture, Mr Garstang said. The company would consider at a later stage outsourcing of other vaccines from India, he added. Dr Krishna Mohan said that despite the availability of JE vaccines in the country, the virus continued to cause death and disease. While there is a significant unmet public health need, a safe and single-dose vaccine is still lacking. As a result, both the World Health Organisation's vaccine research initiative and the Gates Foundation have identified a need for development of a second-generation, affordable JE vaccine that has an acceptable safety profile. The Acambis Chief Executive Officer, Mr Gordon Cameron, said: "The scale of the current epidemic in India has highlighted the critical need for a safe, efficacious and cost-effective vaccine against JE. We believe that the forthcoming phase-III trials of ChimeriVax-JE will demonstrate that our vaccine can meet that need and Bharat Biotech is the ideal partner to help us maximise ChimeriVax-JE's reach in India and neighbouring countries."
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