The price of India’s first nasal COVID vaccine, iNCOVACC, a Bharat Biotech vaccine approved for booster dose, will cost Rs 800 for private vaccination centres and Rs 325 for government vaccination centres, the company announced on December 27, 2022.

The price of India’s first nasal COVID vaccine, iNCOVACC, a Bharat Biotech vaccine approved for booster dose, will cost Rs 800 for private vaccination centres and Rs 325 for government vaccination centres, the company announced on December 27, 2022.

Announcing the pricing, the company statement said, “iNCOVACC is a recombinant replication-deficient adenovirus vectored vaccine with a pre-fusion-stabilised SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. This vaccine candidate was evaluated in phases I, II and III clinical trials with successful results. iNCOVACC has been specifically formulated to allow intranasal delivery through nasal drops. The nasal delivery system has been designed and developed to be cost-effective in low and middle-income countries.”

“We have achieved the goals we set for ourselves during this pandemic. We have developed COVAXIN and iNCOVACC, two COVID vaccines from two different platforms, with two different delivery systems,” Bharat Biotech’s Executive Chairman, Dr Krishna Ella, said.

“The vectored intranasal delivery platform gives us the capability for rapid product development, scale-up, easy and painless immunisation during public health emergencies and pandemics,” he added.

“We thank the Ministry of Health, CDSCO, Dept of Biotechnology, Govt of India, Technology Development Board, and Washington University, St Louis, for their support and guidance,” he further added.

“As a needleless vaccination, iNCOVACC will be India's first such booster dose. India will now have more options when it comes to third doses or precautionary doses. iNCOVACC’s manufacturing platform has the double benefit of enabling faster development of variant-specific vaccines and easy nasal delivery that enables mass immunisation to protect from emerging variants of concern,” Dr Ella said.

The company stated that the clinical trials were conducted to evaluate iNCOVACC as a primary dose schedule and as a heterologous booster dose for subjects who have previously received two doses of the two commonly administered COVID vaccines in India. iNCOVACC was developed in partnership with Washington University, St. Louis, which had designed and developed the recombinant adenoviral vectored construct and evaluated it in preclinical studies for efficacy.

Product development related to preclinical safety evaluation, large-scale manufacturing scale-up, formulation and delivery device development, including human clinical trials, were conducted by Bharat Biotech. Product development and clinical trials with partial funding support from the Government of India.

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