Bharat Biotech has introduced the cell culture H1N1 vaccine under the brand name ‘HNVAC’.

According to the company, it is the country’s first indigenously developed cell culture H1N1 vaccine. The vaccine was tested extensively in one of the largest phase-I, II and III clinical trials for flu vaccines in India and has proved that it is safe and well tolerated.

“While there’s certainly widespread and growing concern around H1N1, there are number of people who did not get a flu shot last year. Our goal right now is get the flu vaccine easily accessible and at affordable cost to high risk groups,” stated Dr Krishna Ella, chairman and director, Bharat Biotech.

“The key benefit of our cell culture vaccine is its potential to scale up and produce large quantities quickly as required, it also has a much more sterile and faster production cycle, without the external dependence on eggs and thus enabling quicker response times in the event of a pandemic,” he added.

The company received the approval from the drugs controller general of India earlier this month to launch HNVAC vaccine which was developed with approved strains from WHO and CDC Atlanta. The single dose vaccine has been developed by Bharat Biotech’s scientists at the Genome Valley facility in Hyderabad.

The safe and controlled mammalian cell culture technology is ahead of several multinational and Indian vaccine companies which still use eggs for manufacturing. US FDA has discouraged the use of egg based vaccines due to adverse reactions from egg based proteins, especially in children, said Dr Ella.

The vaccine will be made available in the market and through government procurement agencies. HNVAC vaccine will be competitively priced ensuring that cost will not be a barrier for consumers to access its vaccines.