Indian partners to make Russian vaccine for supply to Argentina

Mumbai: India will be manufacturing a few million doses of the Sputnik V vaccines for Argentina as part of an agreement with Russia’s Gamaleya National Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology and its sovereign fund Russian Development Investment Fund (RDIF).
The announcement came on Tuesday when the President of Argentina Alberto Fernandez said in an interview his country will be getting supply of the Covid vaccines from Russia.

"The Sputnik V vaccine for Argentina will be produced by RDIF partners in India, Korea, China and a number of other countries that are setting up a production of the Russian vaccine," said Kirill Dmitriev, CEO RDIF. When asked who their Indian manufacturing partner be, RDIF spokesperson said “We have not disclosed our manufacturing partners yet, we prefer not to disclose the details.”


RDIF has a partnership with India’s Dr Reddy’s for conducting clinical trial and manufacturing close to 100 million doses of the Sputnik V vaccine for India. The companies have started clinical trials for this vaccine in India and Dr Reddy’s said last week it was expecting the results from the trials by March 2021.

Sputnik V uses the human adenovirus vector, a vaccine platform that in the past has been commercialised for the rabies vaccine and was recently used for Ebola.

In an interview with ET in September, RDIF CEO Dmitriev said the company was in talks with five other Indian manufacturers for a deal to produce its vaccine. “We believe that India will be a big hub for production of Russian vaccines and these vaccines will be supplied not only to India, but to other markets as well,” Dmitriev told ET.

RDIF was in talks with companies like Mankind Pharma for sales and distribution of its vaccine in India, but neither company have officially announced the deals yet. According to officials aware of the development, RDIF is looking for a potential manufacturing deal to the tune of 300 doses.

The trials of Sputnik V are happening in countries such as UAE, Brazil and Venezuela among others.