Bangavax cleared for human trials

The Directorate General of Drug Administration (DGDA) has approved Globe Biotech Limited to start human trial of its Covid-19 vaccine “Bangavax”.

The government agency gave the approval on Sunday, Globe Biotech Senior Manager (quality and regulation) Dr Mohammad Mohiuddin confirmed it to media.

Globe Biotech Limited has claimed that Bangavax is 100 per cent effective for fighting 11 variants of Covid-19, including the Delta variant.

On January 17 last year, Globe Biotech, the only Bangladeshi company trying to develop a Covid-19 vaccine, submitted an application to the Bangladesh Medical Research Council (BMRC) for approval to conduct clinical trials.

Later on June 16, the BMRC decided to approve Globe Biotech’s Covid-19 vaccine, Bangavax, for human trials.

Globe Biotech received a licence to produce their potential vaccine for trial on December 28, 2020.

The BMRC, which oversees all such trials, got back to them in June last year with certain conditions that had to be met before the clinical trials could go ahead.

The key condition was that Globe Biotech would have to run trials on monkeys or chimpanzees first.

One of the bottlenecks the company identified at the time was that the country did not have a third-party clinical research organization (CRO) that could conduct such tests on animals.