Covid-19 crisis: Race to develop vaccine gets a booster as field widens

On Thursday, CDSCO also approved Zydus Cadila's plasmid DNA vaccine candidate ZyCoV-D, developed at its Vaccine Technology Centre in Ahmedabad.

The race to develop a vaccine for SARS-Cov-2 (novel coronavirus) just got hotter as more competitors received regulatory approval from the Drugs Controller General of India’s (DCGI’s) Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO) to conduct phase-II clinical human trials.

Recently, Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin, a vaccine candidate that it developed in collaboration with the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and the National Institute of Virology (NIV), was approved for human trials, making it the first indigenously developed vaccine to get the nod. To develop Covaxin, NIV Pune isolated the virus strain and transferred it to Bharat Biotech. And the vaccine has