India embarks on vaccine-development scheme

Six diseases are the targets of the vaccine development program in India. The project involves 12 national research institutions and two private companies, Indian Immunologicals and Bharat Biotech, which are both based in Hyderabad, India. Targets of the program are AIDS, cholera, Japanese encephalitis, malaria, rabies, and tuberculosis. In a report in the journal Nature Medicine, K. S. Jayaraman notes that a single agency--the Department of Biotechnology (DBT)--will oversee the project. According to Jayaraman, DBT secretary Manju Sharma predicts the deployment of cholera and rabies vaccines by the year 2002. An oral recombinant cholera vaccine recently proved safe in Phase I trials at the Institute of Microbial Technology, Chandigart, and a promising DNA vaccine for rabies is in late preclinical development at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. The AIDS vaccine initiative, underway at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, will use a poxvirus construct expressing HIV-I subtype C, the strain most prevalent on the Indian subcontinent. N. K. Vinayak, head of the DBT medical division, told Jayaraman that the HIV vaccine would be ready for animal studies in a year. Funding for the program seems small by Western standards: $4 million over 3 years.