Pharmaceutical company Zydus Cadila will supply 1 crore doses of ZyCoV-D, the world's first Plasmid DNA COVID-19 vaccine, to the Government of India by December, government sources said on Thursday.
The Centre has placed an initial order for one crore doses of the vaccine, they added.
Earlier, The Centre had placed an order to supply one crore doses of ZyCoV-D at Rs 265 per dose and the needle-free applicator being offered at Rs 93 per dose, excluding GST.
ZyCoV-D is the first DNA plasmid vaccine in the world for human use, developed indigenously by the company against the Covid-19 virus. It is also the first COVID-19 vaccine that is needle-free and administered using PharmaJet, a needle-free applicator to ensure painless intradermal vaccine delivery which also leads to a significant reduction in any kind of major side effects.
ZyCoV-D has shown good stability at temperatures of around 25 degrees for atleast three months. The thermostability of the vaccine will help in easy transportation and storage of the vaccine without any problems of fluctuations in temperature.
For prolonged use, a temperature of 2-8 degrees is sufficient. Also being a DNA plasmid vaccine, ZyCoV-D doesn't have any problem associated with vector-based immunity. The DNA Plasmid platform allows generating new constructs quickly to deal with mutations in the virus.
( With inputs from ANI )
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