The Rising Star Of Vaccines

How Sharvil Patel and Zydus Cadila—one of the most diversified pharma companies in India—are trying to find an end to India’s Covid-19 woes

- Manu Balachandran & Divya J Shekhar

For Sharvil Patel, February 2020 brought back uncanny memories from a decade ago.

The world was battling another pandemic, swine flu—that originated in Veracruz, Mexico, and spread across 74 countries, killing over 18,000 people, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). The unofficial number, though, estimates that the virus may have killed some 500,000 people, between 2009 and 2010. In India, nearly 2,700 people had lost their lives and over 40,000 were affected.

As pharmaceutical companies scrambled for a cure, Ahmedabad-based Zydus Cadila emerged as a dark horse, becoming the third pharmaceutical firm in the world to bring out a vaccine.

“We were able to bring the H1N1 vaccine to market in less than 10 months,” Sharvil Patel, managing director of Zydus Cadila, tells Forbes India in a telephone interview. “We brought a vaccine in a short period and were the third company in the world after the global companies to have an H1N1 vaccine.” The vaccine, VaxiFlu-S, was the first one to be made in India, where scientists at Zydus Cadila’s facility in Ahmedabad grew the virus in live, fertilised chicken eggs to develop the vaccine.

Today, it’s that experience that Patel and his team are counting on to drive Zydus’s quest to find a cure for the coronavirus. The pandemic, which began in December 2019, has so far killed over 1.5 million and affected some 68.3 million worldwide. In India, the virus has affected 9.74 million people and killed over 141,000.