New Animal Resource Facility India's Latest R&D Move

By Lori Clapper

India’s department of health research announced that the country plans to build its first ever National Animal Resource facility for biomedical research that will only accept animals of a “defined quality.” This will empower researchers to obtain more reliable results for vaccine development.

The new breeding facility will be built on 100 acres in Andhra Pradesh (AP) and is expected to have primates, beagle dogs, and other large animals that are currently not available for testing in India. Industry experts hope the laboratory will create more efficient prophylactic vaccines and curative drugs for diseases like AIDS, Malaria, Hepatitis-C, and more, Asian Age reported.  Pharma companies can also avoid spending excessive amounts of money on outsourcing testing to foreign countries because of the bans placed on testing animals that are caught in the wild in India.

India is indeed emerging as a “vaccine manufacturing hub” because of its biotech solutions, Dr. Renu Swarup, advisor to the Department of Bio-technology (DBT), Government of India, said at her recent Kunthala Jayaraman Endowment Lecture at the Bio Summit at VIT

To support her claim, Swarup said that national and international agencies are currently collaborating to carry out a number of trials that are showing success in testing new vaccines for rotavirus, Japanese encephalitis, rabies, dengue, typhoid, malaria, leprosy, anthrax, and cholera.

She added that “the infrastructure support and research capacity building by the Indian Government had helped the country to be looked upon by other developed countries as a capable partner, to collaborate in the field of biotechnology,” according to The New India Express.

In addition, the country’s genome initiative has enabled progress in sequencing. Most recently, science hubs are forming in Faridabad, Mohali, and Bangalore, in hopes to integrate growth in science engineering, agriculture, and medicine in a multi-disciplinary environment.