VACCINE WARRIORS

BHARAT BIOTECH HAS BEEN AT THE FOREFRONT OF MAKING VACCINES FOR SWINE FLU, POLIO, AND OTHER VIRAL DISEASES FOR A QUARTER OF A CENTURY. YET IT TOOK A GLOBAL PANDEMIC FOR THE SPOTLIGHT TO SHINE ON THE COMPANY CO-FOUNDED BY KRISHNA M. ELLA AND HIS WIFE SUCHITRA M. ELLA.

- Anshul Dhamija

It was September 2019. Dr. T. Jacob John had just finished giving a speech at Bharat Biotech International Limited (BBIL) in Hyderabad and was touring its manufacturing facility. It was then that John—a paediatrician and renowned virologist who set up the clinical virology department in Christian Medical College, Vellore, in the late ’60s—saw something that took him by surprise: a bio-safety level 3, or BSL-3, facility. Surprising because while BBIL was making 16 different vaccines, including six for viral diseases, none of them were so deadly as to require such a state-of-the-art safety facility.

Little did John or BBIL realise how prescient that would turn out to be.

Mere months later, BBIL, started by Krishna M. Ella and his wife Suchitra in 1996, was one of two Indian companies that plunged headlong into manufacturing a vaccine candidate for SARSCoV-2, the virus strain that causes Covid-19. The other was Serum Institute of India (SII), the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer. But there was one major difference. While SII would merely produce the Covishield vaccine being developed by the U.K.-based partnership of AstraZeneca and Oxford University, BBIL, true to its roots, would both develop and produce its candidate, Covaxin.

“I’ve not asked Krishna,” says John. “But knowing his personality, he must have thought to himself, ‘I’m an Indian, therefore what little I can do to help India I will do’.” He wasn’t far from the truth. “I believe that the ‘I’ in India should always stand for innovation. That’s the principle I work on,” says the 65-year-old Ella, chairman and managing director of BBIL.