Indian billionaires bet big on head start in coronavirus vaccine race

In early May, an extremely well-sealed steel box arrived at the cold room of the Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest vaccine maker.

Jeffrey GettlemanThe New York Times
Published : 5 August 2020, 05:01 PM
Updated : 5 August 2020, 05:01 PM

Inside, packed in dry ice, sat a tiny 1-milliliter vial from Oxford, England, containing the cellular material for one of the world’s most promising coronavirus vaccines.

Scientists in white lab coats brought the vial to Building 14, carefully poured the contents into a flask, added a medium of vitamins and sugar and began growing billions of cells. Thus began one of the biggest gambles yet in the quest to find the vaccine that will bring the world’s COVID-19 nightmare to an end.

The Serum Institute, which is exclusively controlled by a small and fabulously rich Indian family and started out years ago as a horse farm, is doing what a few other companies in the race for a vaccine are doing: mass-producing hundreds of millions of doses of a vaccine candidate that is still in trials and might not even work.

But if it does, Adar Poonawalla, Serum’s chief executive and the only child of the company’s founder, will have on hand what everyone wants, possibly in greater quantities before anyone else. Poonawalla said he was “70 to 80%” sure the vaccine would work.

His company, which has teamed up with the Oxford scientists developing the vaccine, was one of the first to boldly announce, in April, that it was going to mass-produce a vaccine before clinical trials even ended. Now, Poonawalla’s fastest vaccine assembly lines are being readied to crank out 500 doses each minute.

With the coronavirus pandemic turning the world upside down, the Serum Institute finds itself in the middle of an extremely competitive and murky endeavour. To get the vaccine out as soon as possible, vaccine developers say they need Serum’s mammoth assembly lines — each year, it churns out 1.5 billion doses of other vaccines, more than any other company.

But right now it’s not entirely clear how much of the coronavirus vaccine that Serum will mass-produce will be kept by India or who will fund its production, leaving the Poonawallas to navigate a torrent of cross-pressures, political, financial, external and domestic.

© 2020 New York Times News Service