The Indian government has launched an ambitious project to develop and manufacture new 'home-grown' vaccines against several communicable diseases within three years for just $4 million.

The initiative marks the first time that the government has allocated funding specifically for vaccine R&D and entrusted the task to a particular agency—the Department of Biotechnology (DBT). The project will fast-track vaccine candidates identified by government laboratories for malaria, tuberculosis, cholera, Japanese encephalitis, rabies and AIDS.

The initiative comprises 12 basic research institutions that have researched potential vaccines over the last two decades, plus two biotechnology companies based in Hyderabad—Indian Immunologicals and Bharat Biotech. Until now, institutes received vaccine R&D allocations within their budgets, "but the scattered research projects failed to produce anything beyond publications," says N.K. Vinayak, who heads DBT's medical division.

DBT secretary Manju Sharma says that the targets were chosen based on the existence of promising leads in these areas. For example, an oral recombinant cholera vaccine developed at the Institute of Microbial Technology in Chandigarh passed Phase I trials last year, and the DNA rabies vaccine developed at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, plus a vaccine against the Indian strain of Japanese Encephalitis virus developed at the National Institute of Immunology, New Delhi, are in late-stage preclinical trials. Sharma anticipates that the vaccines against cholera and rabies will become available for use in the healthcare system at the end of the program in 2002.

Although India has only a limited HIV vaccine research program, the government felt that this should be included in the initiative because "sustained R&D efforts are required to develop a vaccine against the subtype-C virus prevalent in India, rather than the subtype-B vaccines being developed abroad." This work is being done at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi, where a "modified pox virus construct expressing genes of the HIV-1 subtype-C will be ready for animal trials 12 months from now," according to Vinayak.