Covaxin  
New Delhi: COVAXIN will be evaluated as a COVID-19 vaccine candidate in the United States.
Making the announcement, Bharat Biotech said that Ocugen has announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has lifted its clinical hold on the company’s Investigational New Drug (IND) application to evaluate the COVID-19 vaccine candidate, BBV152, known as COVAXIN outside the US.
Ocugen is co-developing COVAXIN for COVID-19 in the US and Canada.
Talking to TOI, Dr Shankar Musunuri, chairman, CEO and co-founder, Ocugen said, “We are pleased to be able to move our clinical programme for Covaxin forward, which we hope will bring us closer to offering an alternative Covid-19 vaccine.”
We firmly believe that managing this pandemic requires more than one approach to vaccines, so we are heartened to be able to continue developing our vaccine candidate, he added.
Covaxin is India’s indigenous COVID-19 vaccine by Bharat Biotech and has been developed in collaboration with the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) – National Institute of Virology (NIV).
It has been developed using Whole-Virion Inactivated Vero Cell-derived platform technology.
As inactivated vaccines do not replicate they are unlikely to revert and cause pathological effects.
According to Bharat Biotech, they contain dead virus, incapable of infecting people but still able to instruct the immune system to mount a defensive reaction against an infection.
Meanwhile, over 2 crore adolescents in the 15-18 age bracket are now fully vaccinated against coronavirus, Union Minister for Health and Family Welfare Mansukh Mandaviya said.
According to the government’s CoWIN portal, a total of 7,38,74,876 doses of vaccines have been administered among this age group so far.