Registering a healthy growth of 23 percent over the last fiscal year, Bharat Biotech has proven that providing vaccines at affordable prices can in fact prove to be a successful business model. Not only did it reap dividends off existing products but also it started to make significant progress in the research and development of other vaccines for infectious diseases.
In June last year, Bharat Biotech announced that it would be selling Rotovac, touted as India's first indigenous rotavirus vaccine, at just $1, as compared to the existing prices of $8 per dose being supplied by multinational companies to public markets. Since its inception, Bharat Biotech has always strived to accelerate its research and development efforts by forging strong partnerships. The rotavirus vaccine is an example of such a model where a number of agencies were involved in developing the product.
Similarly, the development of a Japanese Encephalitis vaccine is in advanced stages of phase III clinical trials and is expected to be launched in the next few years.
Other projects include the development of the chikungunya vaccine which has completed pre-clinical trials and a typhoid conjugate vaccine which is in early phases of clinical trials. In therapeutics, the phase III trials for THR-100, a replacement for thrombolytics such as streptokinase and urokinase, with 120 subjects have been recently completed. This data is currently being evaluated.
Bharat Biotech also manufactures its own pentavalent vaccine, COMVAC5. The company has the capacity to produce 20 million doses of this vaccine every year.
Towards the end of 2011, in a major setback, WHO suspended the supply of Bharat Biotech's premier hepatitis B vaccine, Revac B to UN agencies and simultaneously suspended the applications for pre-qualification approvals of other vaccines undergoing evaluation. This was following a site audit at the manufacturing facility in Hyderabad. The suspension was a precautionary measure and no recall of distributed products was called for. The oral polio virus (OPV) vaccines supply by Bharat Biotech was not affected by this suspension.
| Key Achievements |
Performance highlights |
Key strategy initiatives |
Future plans |
- The phase III clinical trials for the rotavirus vaccine are done.
- Japanese Encephalitis vaccine is in advanced stages of phase III clinical trials and is expected to be launched in the next few years.
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- The Ella foundation, a not-for-profit started by the co-founders of Bharat Biotech, won a $10000 grant money from the BMGF to develop a vaccine against polio after the phasing out of the oral polio virus (OPV) vaccine.
- Bharat Biotech now has a product presence in more than 50 countries.
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- Bharat Biotech targets the 5.8 million emerging market populations and is focusing on region specific neglected diseases.
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- Bharat Biotech hopes to commercialize rotavirus vaccine by 2014 and obtain WHO prequalification by 2015.
- Further develop other vaccines and get prequalified.
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