New Delhi: Years after an agreement between the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and an international organisation to scale up and commercialise a vaccine against shigella fell through, the government health research agency has found an Indian partner to manufacture the breakthrough vaccine candidate. The vaccine candidate developed by the ICMR-National Institute for Research in Bacterial Infections (NIRBI), previously known as the National Institute of Cholera and Enteric Diseases, has shown robust results in animal studies. The development puts the ICMR in the race to offer the first ever vaccine against shigella, which kills tens of thousands every year, mainly children under the age of five.
A gram-negative or hard to treat bacteria, shigella causes the highly infectious shigellosis disease, which is marked by bloody diarrhoea with or without fever. Scientists associated with ICMR-NIRBI told ThePrint that the vaccine — once past the human trials and if everything goes well — could be available for use within the next two years. “We have floated an expression of interest for co-developing and commercialising the vaccine candidate that has shown a high level of efficacy, and an Indian maker is keen to scale up the vaccine production,” Dr Shanta Dutta, director of ICMR-NIRBI, said.
“Once available for human use, it has the potential to immensely curb deaths in kids in middle-and low-income countries due to diarrhoeal disease caused by shigella,” she adde.
