The Department of Biotechnology (DBT) and Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC) has invited applications for COVID-19 Research Consortium. In addition to this, under a ‘Fast Track Review Process’ BIRAC has created a provision to fund COVID-19 solutions that are ready for immediate.

DBT and BIRAC has regularly been evaluating applications with different resources in order for developing diagnostics, vaccines, novel therapeutics, repurposing of drugs or any other intervention for control of COVID-19.  Through a rolling multi-tiered review mechanism, 70 proposals of devices, diagnostics, vaccine candidates, therapeutics and other interventions have been recommended for receiving financial support. The shortlisted proposals includes10 vaccines candidates, 34 diagnostics products or scale-up facilities, 10 therapeutics options, two proposals on drug repurposing and 14 projects which are categorised as preventive interventions.

Very soon IIT Indore is going to develop a Pseudo-virus SARS CoV-2 which is useful for the development of in-vitro assays. The whole portfolio of vaccine candidates is now enhanced by providing support for development of next-generation mRNA vaccine candidates by Gennova and also separately to CMC, Vellore for a lipid encapsulated mRNA based vaccine.

The work towards discovering neutralising antibodies from an existing phage display based library and are being supported under National Biopharma Mission of DBT was initiated by the Delhi University, South Campus. BIRAC has also committed to provide their full support for different types of diagnostics platforms. By this many more academic institutes are in the run to resolve the problem of anticipating long term need for diagnostics by their own ways. In total there are among 34 companies and academic institutes are in total, who will receive financial support by different means for ensuring that there is no shortage of indigenous diagnostic kits in the near future.

And also under this initiative, the startups having PPE solutions have been easily approved for supporting manufacturing of ‘Full body coverage suits’ to Aarna Biomedical Products, automated sanitizer to Micro GO and for “Face Shields” to Alpha Corpusles. This is all categorised as preventive interventions.