Raft of Indian pharma firms set to produce Sputnik V vaccine
The technology transfer is expected to be completed in the 2Q of 2021 followed by full-scale commercial production of the shot.
The RDFI said Virchow Biotech capacities will help facilitate global supply of Sputnik V.
To date, the vaccine has been registered in 54 countries worldwide.
That partnership follows another Sputnik V manufacturing deal with an Indian biopharma producer announced last week; that tie-up will see Stelis Biopharma Pvt. Ltd produce and supply a minimum of 200 million doses of the vaccine.
Manufacture will take place in Stelis' dedicated facility in Bengaluru, India. The doses will start to come on stream from Q3 2021.
Those announcements follows similar deals with Indian pharmaceutical firms Gland Pharma and Hetero.
Other countries producing Sputnik V include Brazil, China, and South Korea.
Sputnik V vaccine
A study published in The Lancet earlier this year showed Sputnik V to be 91.6% efficacious.
Also known as Gam-COVID-Vac, the vaccine was developed by Russia’s Gamaleya National Center; it uses a heterologous recombinant adenovirus approach using adenovirus 26 (Ad26) and adenovirus 5 (Ad5) as vectors for the expression of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) spike protein. The use of two varying serotypes, which are given 21 days apart, is intended to overcome any pre-existing adenovirus immunity in the population.
The recombinant adenovirus route to protection is shared with the Oxford–AstraZeneca vaccine, which uses a chimpanzee adenovirus (ChAdOx), the Johnson & Johnson vaccine that uses only Ad26, and the CanSinoBIO and Beijing Institute of Biotechnology developed Ad5-based vaccine.
