Vice-President M. Venkaiah Naidu has urged the Centre to consider the request of Telangana government to set up a vaccine testing and certification laboratory at Genome Valley in Hyderabad.
An official release said the Vice-President on Thursday spoke to Union Health Minister Dr. Harsh Vardhan and referred to the request made by Telangana Industries and IT Minister K. T. Rama Rao in this regard.
On Wednesday, in a letter to the Union Health Minister, Mr. Rao had underscored the need for having such a facility here as Hyderabad manufactured over six billion doses of vaccines annually and contributed to one-third of global vaccines production.
Pointing out that Hyderabad has come to be known as the ‘Vaccine Capital of the World’, Mr. Rao had sought to highlight the issues for the vaccine-makers in sending the vaccines for testing and certification to the Central Drug Laboratory in Kasauli, Himachal Pradesh. “The logistics and the time involved in sending the vaccines to the CDL in Kasauli were constraining the industry in being a more effective and competitive destination,” he had said in the letter.
Examine request
The release said Dr. Harsh Vardhan assured the Vice-President that he would examine the request from all angles. He also informed Mr. Naidu that there were seven vaccine testing and certification laboratories in the world, including the facility at Kasauli and an accreditation would be required from an international body for such a (new) facility.
Genome Valley, on the outskirts of Hyderabad, is a life science hub and home to multiple facilities of vaccine manufacturers. The Indian Council for Medical Research is establishing the country’s largest National Animal Resource facility for biomedical research there.
Referring to the upcoming facility, for which the State government had provided land for free to ICMR, Mr. Rao had said it could be strengthened further to conduct testing and pre-release certification of immuno biologicals meant for human use in India. He had also sought the setting up of a Government Medical Store Depot (GMSD) facility by the Centre in Hyderabad with state-of-the-art data monitoring and tracking system.
