Chiron Behring relaunches rabies vaccine under ChiroRab brand

Chiron Behring Vaccines, a part of Bharat Biotech, on Wednesday relaunched its rabies vaccine in the country under the ChiroRab brand.

The company used to market the vaccine under the trade name Rabipur earlier. Bharat Biotech acquired Chiron Behring from GSK in March this year and commercial operations at the company's Ankleshwar (Gujarat) unit restarted in May.

"The new vaccine is being manufactured using the same technology (as Rabipur) at the same site...we were highly committed in expediting the manufacturing and commercialisation of ChiroRab," Bharat Biotech Chairman and MD Krishna Ella told reporters here.

The vaccine would be made available for government hospitals in various states through tenders and the remaining lot for private market and exports, he added.

"In our ongoing commitment to address the supply of shortage of rabies vaccine, we are making additional investments to increase production capacities to over 15 million dosages annually," Ella said.

Bharat Biotech also manufactures its in-house rabies vaccine, IndiRab, with an annual capacity of 12 million dosages, thus taking the total capacity of both entities to 27 million dosages per annum.

The total demand for rabies vaccine in India stands at around 40 million dosages per annum, Ella noted.

According to WHO estimates, rabies is a vaccine-preventable disease that claims over 59,000 lives each year, mostly in Asia and Africa.

In India alone, around 17.4 million animal bites occur annually resulting in around 20,800 rabies deaths.