Sanofi Pasteur has launched a combination vaccine 'Pentaxim' in the Indian market last Tuesday. The 'Pentaxim' is a combination of five different vaccines namely, accellular pertussis vaccine, inactivated polio vaccine, Hib (hemophilus influenza type b) vaccine, diphtheria vaccine and tetanus vaccine.

The combination vaccine is expected to protect children from five childhood diseases, namely, tetanus, diphtheria, hib, polio and acellular pertussis diseases. The children upto three months old requires three doses, which is priced at Rs 6,380. After the first launch of Pentaxim in Mumbai, the company will launch same vaccine in other parts of India by the end of December 2007.

Pentaxim is given to children in three doses. The first dose is given at the age of 6 weeks, second dose at 10 weeks, and third dose at 14 weeks. After three doses, children can receive booster dose between the 15 to 18 months. It is not given to the school going children because Hib is not required at that age.

Speaking to Pharmabiz, Sudeep Bhattacharya, marketing manger, said, "We have launched combination vaccine Pentaxim first time in India. We are expecting the full stream market availability of Pentaxim vaccine across the country by the end of 2007. In our R&D centre around 1,500 people are working for developing new vaccines for dengu, cancer and HIV. We are expecting the market availability of these new vaccines will be in another five years".

Recently, company has conducted clinical trials in India for the Pentaxim, which has shown excellent immune response to all the five vaccine. Regarding polio in particular, the immune response is 100 per cent against polio virus type 1 and 3 and 99.1 per cent against type. Besides, these it allows the flexibility of hepatitis B vaccination.

Sanofi-Pasteur, an Indian arm of Sanofi-Aventis, has the industrial scale manufacturing ability to produce vaccine in large quantities to fulfil the health needs. To meet the growing demands for vaccine, it is continuously investing to increase production capacity. Over one billion euros have been invested in production capacity in the last five years.