COVID-19: Two laboratories set up as vaccine testing facilities under PM-CARES in Pune, Hyderabad; Details

COVID-19 vaccine in India: As fears of a third wave of coronavirus pandemic are increasing, India has now ramped up its ecosystem for the development and manufacturing of vaccines! Union Minister Hardeep Singh Puri in a post on microblogging site Twitter said that the ecosystem for supporting vaccine’s development and manufacturing was being scaled up by the Government of India with the help of the PM-CARES fund. Under this, two laboratories in Pune and Hyderabad are being set up as modern and state-of-the-art vaccine testing facilities, and are being notified as Central Drug Laboratories. These are important because the two cities are where the Covishielf and Covaxin coronavirus vaccines are being manufactured, and therefore, these cities are therefore already hubs for vaccine manufacturing.

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In a statement, the Union Ministry of Science and Technology said that at present India only has the Central Drugs Laboratory (CDL) located at Kasauli, and it is the national laboratory for testing and pre-release certification of vaccines and antisera that can be used for humans. The new facilities being notified as CDLs are National Centre for Cell Science (NCCS) in Pune and National Institute of Animal Biotechnology (NIAB) in Hyderabad. These facilities would undertake batch testing as well as quality control of vaccines, with the ability to test about 60 vaccine batches each month, including those of existing vaccines as well as new ones.

These facilities have been facilitating the research in biotechnology for a long time and have also played a key role during the pandemic, which is why, with the help of the PM-CARES Fund, the NCCS has been notified as a Central Drug Laboratory on June 28, and the NIAB in Hyderabad is also likely to be notified soon.

In order to be able to ramp up their facilities to test vaccines, the labs procured state-of-the-art equipment with the support of the PM-CARES Fund, the statement added.