HYDERABAD: Seoul-based International Vaccine Institute (IVI), set up at the initiative of UNDP, will help city's Shanta Biotechnics and Bharat Biotech take cost-effective cholera and typhoid vaccines to other developing countries, including Pakistan.

According to Rodney Carbis, head, vaccine development, IVI, about a lakh children die of cholera every year and another 6 lakh people due to typhoid.

He said IVI would transfer the technology developed by a Vietnamese firm to Shanta for producing the vaccine.

The third phase of clinical trials were on and the vaccine was expected to hit the market in two to three years. IVI would take up with the World Health Organisation the issue of "pre-qualifying" the vaccine produced by Shanta to enable funding agencies like UNICEF to supply it in other developing countries in Asia and Africa.

Pointing out that cholera vaccines available in the country were "very expensive," he said Shanta had agreed to provide the vaccine at an affordable cost.

"We can sell it for less than a dollar per dose. Normally two doses are required," he told The Hindu on the sidelines of the Bio-Asia-2007 here.

Mr. Carbis said that typhoid was a huge health problem in Pakistan. Its incidence was also high in South East Asia and South America. IVI was also working on a project to develop a vaccine against dengue.

Vaccine for HPV

Meanwhile, Managing Director, Shanta Biotechnics, K.I. Varaprasad Reddy, said that a "technically superior" vaccine for Human Pappiloma Virus (HPV), which mostly causes cervical cancer, was being developed by the company in collaboration with Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, US.

It would be available in India by 2011 at one-tenth cost of the currently available vaccines.

According to Richard Roden, associate professor, department of pathology, the Johns Hopkins University, HPV is believed to cause 5.2 per cent of cancers worldwide and 99 per cent of cervical cancer.

He said that PAP smear and interventions reduced cervical cancers by 80 per cent in the United States and attributed the high incidence of the disease in India to lack of screening.

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