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What TV doesn't, print can't; we deliver.
NEW DELHI: India’s Bharat Biotech, Switzerland’s ExcellGene SA and University of Sydney have come together to manufacture a “variant-proof” Covid-19 vaccine.
The SARS-CoV-2 vaccine candidate will be developed under the recently-approved consortium funding through the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI).
Under this initiative, CEPI will provide funding up to USD 19.3 million for phase I clinical trials.
Together with Bharat Biotech and Prof. Jamie Triccas and his team at Australia’s University of Sydney, ExcellGene will generate and screen a large and diverse library of chimeric spike proteins to identify highly cross-reactive antigen structures that recall past and possibly future variants.
ExcellGene will produce complex chimeric Spike antigens using its engineered CHOExpress-cell based technology, as per Indian vaccine manufacturer Bharat Biotech.
The Swiss company will use insights from several scientific and technical disciplines along with artificial intelligence to identify the most promising antigenic structure.
It began producing Wuhan trimeric SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins in March 2020, and subsequently Alpha, Beta, Delta and Omicron variants.
“With this new funding, ExcellGene expands in collaboration with the team of Prof. Jamie Triccas that started in early 2020,” Bharat Biotech said.
To produce a vaccine that would work against all variants of Covid-19, ExcellGene will generate an entirely new “chimeric” spike antigen complex, different from any protein of existing SARS-CoV-2 variants.
It is expected that such a trimeric spike protein, composed of combined mutations that characterise virus variants of concern from 2020-2022 will induce a wider range of cross-reactivity against historic or future variants than any of the individual virus variants did before.
Speaking on the new collaboration, Bharat Biotech chairman and managing director Dr Krishna Ella said, “Being a successful vaccine producer, particularly in the COVID-19 field, does not allow us to rest. We are therefore very pleased in having convinced the CEPI organization that our partnership over three continents is a robust solution that promises to open a new door for a future cross-reactive vaccine
