AHMEDABAD: Ahmedabad-based Cadila Pharmaceuticals Ltd, a privately owned drug company by Modi family, will commercialise India's first virus like particle (VLP) based technology seasonal flu vaccine within next 18 months. The company is also working on antibiotic resistance breaker (ARBs) technology to solve the problem rising from the super-bug - New Delhi Metallo-beta-lactamase-1 (NDM-1).
Rajiv Modi, Chairman and managing director of Cadila Pharmaceuticals Ltd said "The VLP technology flu vaccine would be commericialised within next 12 to 18 months". In 2009, Cadila Pharmaceutical acquired 12.5 million shares of Nasdaq-listed Novavax for an aggregated amount of $11 million then.
Same year, Novavax and Cadila Pharma created a joint venture called CPL Biologicals Pvt Ltd, to develop and manufacture vaccines using VLP technology. Traditionally, in India and throughout the world, conventional egg-based technology is used to produce vaccine. However, egg-based technology is time consuming and it requires huge capital investment for creating its infrastructure, thus making egg-based vaccines are costly.
While, the new technology VLP are cheaper and is faster in producing a vaccine for a new flu. Usually, this technology has a huge potential for vaccine making for flue virus which mutates quickly.
According to Mr Modi, the company has already applied to Drug Controller General of India (DCGI) for getting the approval for VLP-based seasonal flu vaccines. The company is also working on developing another three VLP-based vaccines for Rabies vaccine, Human Papillomavirus (HPV) and Hepatitis E Virus (HEV).
The company is also working on antibiotic resistance breakers (ARBs) technology after a recent collaboration with UK-based Helperby Therapeutics. "If everything goes well, we would be able to commercialize the ARBs within another three years." said Mr Modi.
ARBs is a technology which can be combined with other antibiotics to treat those diseases where bacteria have developed capacity to withstand even higher dosages of antibiotic drugs, thus making those bacteria a drug resistant bacteria.
There are 20 classes of antibiotic drugs out of which Cadila Pharmaceuticals is working on five classes including on a antibiotic class that faces difficulties from - New Delhi Metallo-beta-lactamase-1 (NDM-1). The super-bug NDM-1 is an enzyme that makes bacteria resistant to a broad range of antibiotics.
The super-bug have been found in drinking water around New Delhi and in patients in over 35 countries, many of them medical tourist who traveled to India for medical care then returned home to Western countries. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) the first reports of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis or XDR TB began surfacing in 2006.
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