Billionaire-Led Indian Drugmaker’s Vaccine Beats Glaxo in Study

[xchrom]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-16/billionaire-led-drugmaker-s-50-cent-vaccine-beats-glaxo-s-version-in-study.html

A vaccine developed by Serum Institute of India Ltd., led by billionaire Cyrus Poonawalla, was better at protecting people from a strain of meningitis in sub-Saharan Africa than older products from companies including GlaxoSmithKline Plc (GSK), researchers said.

About 600 children under two years old were given the vaccines and their immunity levels tested four weeks and 10 months after the inoculation. More than 96 percent of those who received Serum’s MenAfriVac had high levels of antibodies in their blood after four weeks, compared with 64 percent in the group that got Glaxo’s Mencevax Acwy, scientists wrote in a paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine today.

The vaccine could prevent about 150,000 deaths by 2020, lead author Marie-Pierre Preziosi said in a telephone interview. Since 1988, more than a million people in Africa have been infected by the disease, which causes mental retardation and permanent deafness and can be fatal within hours if untreated, according to the World Health Organization.

“For more than a century, these African countries have been suffering because of this huge and devastating epidemic,” Preziosi, who heads the unit responsible for clinical development of a meningitis vaccine at the WHO, said from her Geneva office on June 14. “We now have a tool that has the potential to eliminate meningitis epidemics from Africa.”

[mzmolly]

1. Taking the profit out of the equation produced a better product?

Imagine that?

http://www.seruminstitute.com/content/about_us.htm

Serum Institute of India was founded in 1966 with the aim of manufacturing life-saving immuno-biologicals, which were in shortage in the country and imported at high prices. Thereafter, several life-saving biologicals were manufactured at prices affordable to the common man and in abundance, with the result that the country was made self-sufficient for Tetanus Anti-toxin and Anti-snake Venom serum, followed by DTP (Diphtheria, Tetanus and Pertussis) group of Vaccines and then later on MMR (Measles, Mumps and Rubella) group of vaccines.

The Philanthropic philosophy of the company still not only exists but has been proliferated to bring down the prices of newer vaccines such as Hepatitis-B vaccine, Rabies vaccine, Combination vaccine etc., so that not only Indian's, but the entire under-privileged children of the world, in more than 140 countries are protected from birth onwards.

K and R.