Russia's Sputnik V covid vaccine to be produced in India

Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) and Indian pharma company Hetero, have agreed to produce in India over 100 million doses per year of Sputnik V covid vaccine in India, Russia's sovereign wealth fund said. The production of the Russian covid vaccine is expected start in the beginning of 2021.

“We are pleased to collaborate with RDIF as a manufacturing partner for the most anticipated Sputnik V vaccine for the treatment of Covid-19. While we look forward to the clinical trial results in India, we believe that manufacturing the product locally is crucial to enable swift access to patients," B. Murali Krishna Reddy, Director – International Marketing, Hetero Labs Limited commented.

RDIF on November 24 had announced positive results obtained during the second interim data analysis of the largest double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled Phase III clinical trials in Russia involving 40,000 volunteers.

Kirill Dmitriev, CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, in a statement said: “We are delighted to announce the agreement between RDIF and Hetero that will pave the way to production of the safe and highly effective Sputnik V vaccine on Indian soil. The vaccine’s interim clinical trial results show 95% efficacy on the 42nd day after the first dose. Thanks to our cooperation with Hetero, we will be able to significantly increase production capacity and provide people of India with an efficient solution in this challenging period of the pandemic.”

Since November 9, four drug makers have announced that their vaccines work, most of them more than 90% of the time.

The first to report Phase 3 results was the US-German collaboration between pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and German biotech start-up BioNTech, followed by the US firm Moderna, a British partnership between AstraZeneca and Oxford University, and Russia's state-run Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology which has developed the Sputnik V vaccine.

"Currently Phase III clinical trials are approved and are ongoing in Belarus, the UAE, Venezuela and other countries, as well as Phase II-III in India. Requests for more than 1.2 billion doses of Sputnik V vaccine came from more than 50 countries. The vaccine supplies for the global market will be produced by RDIF’s international partners in India, Brazil, China, South Korea and other countries," the Russian sovereign wealth fund said in a statement.

Russia's President Vladimir Putin had announced Sputnik V’s approval in August even before the final trial, saying one of his daughters had been vaccinated. (With Agency Inputs)