Main image via The Indian Express

With the pandemic hitting the world hard, every country is working around the clock to create a vaccine that would bring the pandemic to an end. With a few leading nations already announcing their vaccines in  clinical trials, new hope emerges from India, as India's first COVID-19 vaccine candidate 'COVAXIN' gets approval for human clinical trials.
 
The Drug Controller General of India (DCGI) has given the green light to initiate Phase I & II human clinical trials for India’s first vaccine candidate against Covid-19. The human clinical trials are scheduled to start in July, and the results are expected to available by October of 2020, after the clinical trials.
 

 
Dr Krishna Ella, Chairman and Managing Director, Bharat Biotech, said,
“We are proud to announce Covaxin, India’s first indigenous vaccine against Covid-19. The collaboration with ICMR and NIV was instrumental in the development of this vaccine. The proactive support and guidance from CDSCO have enabled approvals for this project.”
 
The Indian-based company’s vaccine has been named as Covaxin and is an inactivated vaccine. The inactivated virus functions in a way that involves growing the virus on a large scale and killing/inactivating the virus with a chemical. Once the vaccine is injected into a human, it has no potential to infect or replicate, since it is a killed virus. It helps the immune system mount an antibody response towards virus.
 
If the clinical trials go as planned, we can expect the vaccine available globally soon.

Info via Newindianexpress

Written by Thineshkan