MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 27th November, 2020) The Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) announced on Friday that it reached an agreement with India's pharmaceutical company Hetero on producing over 100 million doses of Russia's coronavirus vaccine Sputnik V per year in India.
"RDIF ... and Hetero, one of India's leading generic pharmaceutical companies (through its biologics arm "Hetero Biopharma") have agreed to produce in India over 100 million doses per year of the world's first registered vaccine against the novel coronavirus infection - Sputnik V," RDIF said in a press release, published in the Twitter account of the vaccine.
Production is expected to start in the beginning of 2021.
"I am confident that Sputnik V should become an integral part of the national vaccine portfolio of every country willing to protect its population from the coronavirus. Thanks to our cooperation with Hetero, we will be able to significantly increase production capacity and provide people of India with an efficient solution in this challenging period of the pandemic," RDIF CEO Kirill Dmitriev said, as quoted in the press release.
Hetero Labs Limited Director for International Marketing B. Murali Krishna Reddy noted that the company was pleased to cooperate with RDIF as a manufacturing partner for the "most anticipated" vaccine.
"While we look forward to the clinical trial results in India, we believe that manufacturing the product locally is crucial to enable swift access to patients. This collaboration is another step towards our commitment in the battle against Covid-19 and realizing the objective of 'Make-in-India' campaign," Reddy said, as quoted in the press release.
In August, Sputnik V, developed by the Gamaleya research institute and produced in cooperation with RDIF, became the world's first registered vaccine against COVID-19. According to the results of the second interim analysis of the clinical trials data, the vaccine has proven to be 91.4 percent effective 28 days after the injection of the first dose and 95 percent effective 42 days after the injection of the first dose.
