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Serum Inst cuts hepatitis-B vaccine cost by 40%

An Indian firm that says its vaccines are used to immunise one of every two children in the world, on Wednesday, cut the price of its hepatitis-B vaccine by almost half.

Serum Institute of India Ltd said it is cutting the maximum retail price by 40 per cent to Rs 525 for 20 doses.

That should cut the cost of a single dose to around Rs 20, and the total cost of the three-dose course to Rs 60, or about the daily average income in India, company founder Dr Cyrus Poonawalla said.

"This is in keeping with a philosophy of providing affordable vaccines for all the children of India," Poonawalla, who refers to the company he created as the world's No 1 manufacturer of affordable vaccines, told a news conference in Mumbai.

Serum Institute is a major vaccine supplier to the World Health Organisation and to UN bodies such as children's agency UNICEF. The little-known and usually media-shy company supplies vaccines used in more than 130 countries.

Its sales were Rs 4 billion ($82 million) in the year to March, two-thirds of that from exports.

Poonawalla said Serum Institute was able to slash the vaccine's price because it had greatly boosted output by adopting the latest German recombinant technology.

The company now uses a recombinant technique in which the protein of the hepatitis-B virus attaches to yeast cells, which then produce large quantities of the protein used to make the vaccine.

Poonawalla said Serum Institute can now can produce 100 million doses of the vaccine each year, and estimated annual revenue it generates would reach Rs 200 million within 18 months.

That is a tenth of India's two-billion-rupee-a-year market for hepatitis-B vaccines.

Dr Prahlad Patki, the firm's deputy medical director, said Serum Institute provided 70 to 75 per cent of the DTP (diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis) vaccines and 78 per cent of the measles vaccines administered annually by UNICEF.

Privately owned Serum Institute makes the vaccines at a state-of-the-art laboratory in Pune, 150 km (90 miles) southeast of Mumbai, the country's commercial capital.

Patki said 350 million people worldwide were infected with the hepatitis-B virus which infects the liver, slowly killing cells, leading to cirrhosis, cancer and possibly death.

NO CURE

The virus causes 60 per cent of the cases of liver disease and 80 per cent of liver cancers, which is 30 per cent more contagious than HIV, the virus that can cause AIDS, Patki said.

The company said in a statement that 40 million to 50 million Indians were estimated to be infected with hepatitis-B, which can be treated with interferon and antiviral drugs, though there is no cure.

The high cost of treatment makes prevention by vaccination a far more cost-effective approach to dealing with the disease, Dr Rustom Mody, the company's head of hepatitis-B vaccine production, said.

The vaccine was 95 per cent effective, he said.

He said the rate of infection had fallen in some countries from seven to eight per cent to one to two per cent after widespread vaccination was introduced.

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