Bharat Biotech, on August 29, announced the commercial launch of the first batch of Covaxin from its Chiron Behring Vaccines facility in Ankleshwar, Gujarat.
Union Health Minister of Health and Family Welfare Mansukh Mandaviya inaugurated the Covaxin batches.
Products manufactured from Ankleshwar facilities will be available for supplies starting September.
With specialised biosafety containment facilities in Hyderabad, Malur, Ankleshwar, and Pune, Bharat Biotech said it was steadily moving towards its aim of one billion doses of annualised capacity.
A new filing facility was constructed during 2020 at Ankleshwar. It is now being utilized for the production of Covaxin. The Covaxin production began in early June, before which the team had executed engineering batches to study the equipment functionality at the facility.
Chiron Behring Vaccines is a wholly owned subsidiary of Bharat Biotech.
Bharat Biotech has already deployed multiple production lines at its Hyderabad, Malur, Bengaluru, and Pune campuses, and the addition of Chiron Behring, Ankleshwar will further augment its Covaxin production capacity.
The company did not disclose the capacity of doses available from Ankleshwar, but earlier it said that the Gujarat unit can produce up to 200 million doses per annum.
The company said it is also exploring manufacturing partnerships with its partners in other countries, who have prior expertise with commercial scale manufacturing of inactivated viral vaccines under biosafety containment for further augmentation.
“India is focused on slowing the spread of COVID-19 in the country, and the key to achieving this lies in the swift and efficient administration of vaccines," said Mandaviya.
"We want to ensure equitable access of the vaccine to every Indian citizen, and the expansion of COVAXIN® production facilities by Bharat Biotech will take us closer to this goal,” he added.
Krishna Ella, Chairman & Managing Director, Bharat Biotech, said, “We want to ensure that Bharat Biotech can ably meet the demand for Covaxin such that individuals across the country, and the globe, have access to the vaccine and can secure their health and safety. Our goal to develop a vaccine with global safety and efficacy standards has now been achieved, we are now marching towards the goal of annualized capacity of one billion doses.”
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