CEPI to include India among six other countries for COVID-19 Vaccine Testing

The Global Initiative of Coalition of Epidemic Preparedness for Innovation, CEPI has identified six labs from countries such as Britain, Netherlands, Italy, Canada, Bangladesh and India.

Highlights

The THSTI lab of India has been recognised under the global network of CEPI for assessment of COVID-19 vaccines. THSTI is Translational Health Science and Technology Institute. It is an autonomous institute of Department of Biotechnology.

What is the plan?

The THSTI lab will use the same set of protocols and same reagents and measure the immune response of multiple vaccines.

The IndCEPI Mission was implemented by the Department of Biotechnology to measure clinical immunogenicity. IndCEPI is India Centric Epidemic Preparedness through Rapid Vaccine Development. This is now to be enhanced by THSTI. The lab will perform comparability studies with other international laboratories.

CEPI

It is headquartered in Norway. It is a foundation that takes donations to finance research projects developing vaccines against Emerging Infectious Diseases. CEPI focuses on “Blueprint Priority Diseases” of WHO (World Health Organization).

CEPI tests vaccines and establishes stockpiles of investigational vaccines before the epidemic begins to spread at large scale. Also, It will fund new and innovative platform technologies to manufacture vaccines.

Blueprint Priority Diseases

According to WHO, the diseases are classified as Blueprint Priority Diseases if they have the potential to create health emergencies and lack effective vaccines and treatments. Currently, the following diseases have been included under Blueprint Priority Diseases

• Ebola
• Haemorrhagic Fever
• Nipah
• Zika
• Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Corona Virus (MERS-COV)
• SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome).

What are Emerging Infectious Disease?

The Emerging Infectious Disease is a disease that has increased recently in the past twenty years.

IndCEPI Mission

The mission focuses on developing affordable vaccines for endemic diseases. Also, it develops protein rich wheat and biofortified wheat under POSHAN Abhiyan.

Month: Current Affairs - October, 2020