The Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) recently approved Biological E.’s Corbevax vaccine as the first heterogeneous COVID-19 booster vaccine in India for adults above 18 years who have received two shots of Covaxin or Covishield. Corbevax has the added advantage of scalability and thermostability, making it suitable for deployment in low-resource settings, says GlobalData.

The leading data and analytics company notes that Biological E. has now carved out its place in the COVID-19 vaccine market due to its capacity to produce over a 100 million monthly doses.

Anupama Mishra, Pharma Analyst at GlobalData, comments: “It has been observed in recent clinical studies conducted in insitutes such as CMC Vellore and AIG Hyderabad hospital in India, that heterologous immunization is safe and provides better results than homologous vaccinations*. Notably, having a **booster dose of Corbevax had increased the neutralizing antibody titers in the Covishield and Covaxin groups significantly when compared to the placebo. Hence, it becomes very important that countries like India take all possible measure to not only increase the pace of vaccination but also its efficacy by inclusion of a heterologous booster*** which is an adopted strategy in developed countries.”

According to GlobalData, as of 20 June 2022, India has 43.2 million confirmed cases and the company’s dashboard forecasts 43.4 million confirmed cases in a low transmission risk scenario by 26 June 2022. In the wake of increasing COVID cases in the country, it is now important to increase the pace of vaccination. Notably, as of 20 June 2022, there has been an increase of 4,226 daily cases in India, wherein the state of Kerala reported a rise of more than 1,000 cases in a single day.

GlobalData’s Pharma Intelligence Center revealed that as of 20 June 2022, the Indian government has administered 1,960 million vaccine doses and 40.4 million precaution doses (which is the term used for a booster dose in India).

Mishra concludes: “Heterogenous vaccination*** is a new concept in India so it will take time to adopt this new vaccination approach as well as spread awareness of it. It has also been observed that the uptake of Corbevax in the adult population is slow compared to the other options, Covaxin and Covishield. Moreover, we can expect more heterologous approvals soon. As a result, the short-lived but niche position of Corbevax should set it up for moderate commercial success in the Indian COVID-19 vaccination market.”

* A homologous booster is where you are vaccinated with one type of vaccine.

** https://www.biologicale.com/news.html

***A heterologous booster is when the third dose is different from the earlier doses.