ZyCoV-D is a platform for the future

Exclusive interview Sharvil P. Patel, managing director, Zydus Cadila

- POOJA BIRAIA JAISWAL

You wanted to release ZyCoV-D on Gandhi Jayanti. Was it delayed because of pricing issues?

Our original plan was to release it in October. Now we are waiting for the pricing approval. It is more complicated because there are three doses plus the injector plus the adapters. We hope to clear all that by this week and launch it as soon as it is done. It will be competitively priced. Our pricing is based on the technology, scale, capacity and procurement. There are a lot of advantages to this vaccine, and not only for today. It is a platform for the future.

Tell us about plasmid DNA, the technology behind world's first such vaccine.

This vaccine is focused on the virus’s spike protein. When administered in a human body, the ZyCoV-D will produce the spike protein of the SARSCoV-2 virus. There has been great interest in this technology because of its ability to elicit both humoral immune responses (relating to immune responses involving antibodies in body fluids) and cellular immune responses (antibodies in cells) and in showing relevant advantages regarding producibility, stability and storage.

The good part about this is that the vaccine constructs, which are generated quickly to deal with mutations in the virus, are non-replicating and there is no vector-based immunity built because we don’t use anything other than the spike protein. So there are no adjuvants (an ingredient used to create a stronger immune response) and no infectious vectors. All of it makes the administration of the vaccine easier. [The side effects, too, have been the lowest].