IAVI Report - February / March 2001
 

Dehli—On Monday 19 March 2001, the Indian Ministry of Health and Family Welfare announced the launch of a partnership with IAVI to develop AIDS vaccines suitable for India. The agreement, which also includes the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR), provides a framework for joint projects in vaccine design, buildup of capacity for clinical trials and transfer of appropriate vaccine manufacturing technology to India. Plans also call for education and advocacy projects around HIV vaccines, and for facilitating community involvement in these activities.

The first program in the partnership will develop a vaccine that incorporates multiple HIV genes (env, pol, gag, rev, nef and tat) from an Indian isolate of subtype C into an MVA viral vector. Under a separate agreement announced on 20 March, this vaccine will be designed and engineered at Therion Biologics, a biotech company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with visiting Indian scientist Sekhar Chakrabarti of the National Institute of Cholera and Enteric Diseases in Calcutta. Therion will also produce pilot vaccine lots for Phase I clinical testing in India. 

The collaboration between India and IAVI grew out of a working group formed in January 2000 under the auspices of the ICMR, headed by N.K. Ganguly. It includes scientists from several ICMR-associated institutes and from IAVI. 

Researchers led by Ramesh Paranjape at the National AIDS Research Institute (NARI) in Pune have begun work on the MVA project and are characterizing HIV isolates from several recent seroconverters in the region, where NARI will conduct clinical trials of the candidate vaccine. Chakrabarti is now cloning and sequencing genes from one of the isolates and will bring the subcloned sequences to Therion for vaccine construction. The MVA vaccine is expected to enter Phase I testing in about two years.  

At a later stage, Therion will transfer the technology to an Indian vaccine manufacturer, which will produce lots for eventual Phase II/III clinical  trials. India has a large vaccine production capacity that manufactures nearly a dozen different childhood vaccines for use throughout the developing world.

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©2001. The IAVI Report.

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