MUMBAI: There’s a new vaccine technology platform in the works in India. Pune-based biotech firm Gennova Biopharmaceuticals, which recently secured government funding for its `messenger or mRNA-based vaccine’ candidate for SARS-CoV-2, is planning to start human trials by October. The company expects to launch the vaccine by March 2021, subject to successful completion of Phase 1 and 2 clinical trials. Globally, two mRNA based COVID19 vaccine candidates are being pursued by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNtech, which have completed Phase 1 human trials, and shown `promising’ results.
The mRNA vaccine technology is synthetic in nature and has the potential to reduce the speed of vaccine development timeline, Gennova CEO Dr Sanjay Singh t