Staff Reporter :
Bangladeshi drug maker Globe Biotech Limited will begin production of its Covid-19 vaccine candidate for clinical trial soon.
“Globe Biotech Limited is ready for experimental produce of covid-19 vaccine as per the approval of Bangladesh Directorate General of Drug Administration (DGDA) to conduct a clinical trial,” said Asif Mahmud, In-Charge of the company’s research and development department.
He said that the company got license on December 28 to produce the vaccine, but the matter had not been disclosed to the media at the time. He said, “We will now submit our protocol to the Bangladesh Medical Research Council (BMRC) for clinical trials next week. We hope to start the clinical trials shortly.”
“As we got the approval from DGDA, we are hopefully getting the BMRC’s green signal soon. We are optimists that the human body trial of the jab will be successful and the people of Bangladesh will be proud to get its own inoculation on the battle ground against Covid-19,” said Asif Mahmud.
Globe Biotech is the only Bangladeshi firm in the race to develop an effective and safe coronavirus jab.
Experts have seen the inoculation as the only way to eliminate the threat of the fatal virus which pushed the world to the ongoing pandemic and claimed at least 1.86 million lives and infected more than 86.46 million globally.
Globe Biotech limited, the sister concern of the Globe Pharmaceuticals Limited is the lone Bangladeshi firm running to develop vaccines with the bid to eliminate the coronavirus from the country.
Earlier the firm introduced its under-developed jab as ‘Bancovid’, but it changed its name of the vaccine candidate to ‘Bangavax’.
The experimental Covid-19 vaccine enlisted in the World Health Organization’s list of draft landscape of candidate vaccines.
Globe had announced the development of the candidate in July last year.
In October, the firm said that its vaccine has been proved as effective as safe after trials on rats.
