Even as representatives of the Indian pharmaceutical industry and the drugs regulatory authorities of India and the US were discussing the parameters to evolve a uniform testing standard for the pharma industry at an international conference at Taj Residency, in Hyderabad on Monday, an international workshop was being held in the adjacent auditorium on harmonizing testing procedures on Rapid Fluorescent Focus Inhibition Test (RFFIT) used for evaluation of efficacy in rabies vaccines in vaccinated subjects in the Asian countries.

The five-day workshop is being organised by Indian Immunologicals Ltd, in collaboration with Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Atlanta, USA, and Thai Red Cross Institute, Bangkok, Thailand.

For all practical purposes it is a live workshop for scientists involved in evaluating rabies vaccines so that uniformity is achieved in methodology and the results obtained. This is crucial for a vaccine such as the one for rabies, since it is life threatening. The resource persons from the US, scientists from Thailand, Philippines, Sri Lanka, and various institutes in India like the Central Research Institute Kasauli, Pasteur Institute Coonoor, National Institute of Communicable Diseases, New Delhi, Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana, College of Veterinary Science, Tirupati, are participating in the workshop which will last till September 27.

Inaugurating the workshop, Dr G Padmanabhan, Professor Emeritus and former Director of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, complimented IIL for its excellent endeavours in scientific research with social objectives in mind. He said IIL, in collaboration with IISc, Bangalore would be the first in the world to bring out a DNA vaccine for rabies. He stressed the need for India to be a global vaccine player following the gap created by the pharma companies, which felt it, was not viable economically.

K V Balasubramaniam, Managing Director, IIL, said the company''s approach had been towards the issues of science, technology, and epidemiological aspects of the disease and not merely the vaccine per se. He said, " IIL was not merely a vaccine company. Because, if we believe so, we will be only manufacturing vaccines, sell them at a profit and make a lot of money. However, what we believe in is that we are a socially conscious company and that we have a mission of addressing the solutions to the very disease that our vaccine works against."

Starting with FMD (foot and mouth disease) vaccine, IIL is now manufacturing tissue culture rabies vaccine, Raksharab, for the animal health market, and the tissue culture human rabies vaccine, Abhayrab. IIL was also working on a DNA rabies vaccine. The company, he said, was one of the major vaccine suppliers in the world. It had the largest FMD plant in Asia and the second largest facility in the world.

Dr Deborah J Briggs, CDC, Atlanta, thanked IIL for organising this workshop as this has great significance for the Asian countries. He said India was the only country outside Europe and the US to develop the cell culture rabies vaccine. She felt that at the end of this workshop the capacity to test and evaluate thousands of serum samples, and do so in a competent manner, would increase significantly. She hoped that India would stop using the painful nerve tissue vaccine against rabies.

Dr V A Srinivasan, Executive Director, IIL, welcoming the delegates, said IIL''s involvement in rabies research started in 1986 and now it was one of the leading institutes in the world. He said IIL was organising the RFFIT workshop as a part of its social objective to create more understanding of the science among professionals.