Covid-19: Kolkata woman in Oxford University vaccine project team

LONDON: A Kolkata woman is playing a crucial role in the Oxford University team trying to develop the Covid-19 vaccine which could potentially end the global pandemic.

Chandra Datta, 34, who lives in Oxford, is working as a quality assurance manager at the university facility which is manufacturing the anti-viral vector vaccine — ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 — which went to human trials last Thursday. If the vaccine passes the trials, it could be made available to the public by September or October this year, she said, warning, “It all depends on the trial data.”

Datta, who hails from Kolkata, went to Gokhale Memorial Girls’ School and completed her BTech in engineering and biotechnology from the Heritage Institute of Technology, Kolkata. She moved to the UK in 2009 to take the MSc-Bioscience (Biotechnology) cours