Riding The Vaccine Wave

The world of vaccine and drug development is being reset. Here's how indian pharma must reinvent to lead the new era of drug discovery and research

- P.B. Jayakumar And Joe C. Mathew

25%

Share of world Covid-19 vaccines to be produced in India

$93 billion

The size of the global vaccine market due to Covid-19 pandemic, from $41.6 billion in 2018

100+

Countries where Indian vaccines will be supplied

Normally, it doesn't make a great business case, especially between two outbreaks,” Vasant Narasimhan, global CEO of Swiss pharmaceutical multinational Novartis AG, said in an exclusive interview to BT in February 2020. He was reacting to why leading global drug discovery firms were least interested in developing vaccines against viral infections such as Covid-19.

At that point, the novel coronavirus infection that would swamp the world in the following months and drag down the global economy on a scale never seen in a century was still a curious virus surfacing in Far East Asia. India barely had three cases of Covid-19 even though the virus had surfaced in Wuhan three months earlier in mid-November 2019. And the World Health Organization (WHO) was yet to declare the outbreak a pandemic.