As economics around the world is suffering from the impact of the pandemic, businesses are running under losses, people are facing employment problems, and many face the challenge of a complete upheaval of lifestyle. Life is not the same anymore, pushing our front-line warriors towards an endless struggle to make ends meet.
However, pharmaceutical companies are taking the center stage in the Covid-19 fight and are seeing growth on the stock market.A growing number of pharmaceutical companies are scrambling to roll out what will likely be the first generation of drugs specific to Covid-19. Like plasma transfusions, these drugs are built on antibodies. But they’re delivered in a concentration that aims to be more effective, consistent, and able to be massproduced.Several companies are preparing to start clinical trials with an antibody-based Covid-19 drug, and several projects could be available hopefully in the weeks to come.
Race towards the vaccine
As the race towards the vaccine has already started, at least seven Indian pharma companies are working to develop a vaccine against coronavirus as they join global efforts to find a preventive check of the spread of the deadly virus that has already infected more than 14 million globally.Recently, Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin, a vaccine candidate that it developed in collaboration with the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and the National Institute of Virology (NIV), was approved for human trials, making it the first indigenously developed vaccine to get the nod.
Pandemic Times 33 September 2020 india’s 10 Best Pharmacy Colleges 2020 The Academic Insights CDSCO also approved Zydus Cadila’s plasmid DNAvaccine candidate ZyCoV-D, developed at its Vaccine Technology Centre in Ahmedabad.The pricing behavior of pharma companies isn’t surprising, given how the industry operates and how individual players compete. Although the industry is guided in principle by patient centricity, it is also made up of myriad companies trying to outsmart and outpace their rivals. Competition among individual pharmaceutical companies boosts innovation and spurs the invention of new or better drugs and vaccines as well as more efficient processes.
But this competition-based model, with every company for itself, could be a real liability in the race to develop drugs and vaccines to combat COVID-19. A better approach would be for pharma companies and partners outside of the industry to temporarily hit the pause button on their traditional ways of doing business and find new ways to work together, as some scientists are advocating now.
As more trials take place and new emerging therapies are publicized, drug companies will now be under pressure to show their own compassion regarding drug development royalties. Moreover, in a time of economic regression and global health fears due to Covid-19, the reputations of pharmaceutical companies are on the line and their impact on the fight against the virus will not be easily forgotten. The concept of large profits coming from newly developed drugs will face increased scrutiny in a time of global pandemic as a result of public and competitive pressures. The least we can do, as common folk, is to wait for the pharma companies to save us from this crisis, scratch free and worry free, and restore the whole world back to normal. And, as always we will be there highlighting the important updates about the vaccine, in our combined journey towards normalcy.