‘Our vaccine should be ready by March’

Zydus Cadila

is among the few companies that increased their workforce amid the pandemic, when most firms were downsizing due to the demand slowdown. The pharmaceutical company's chairman Pankaj R Patel says performance rewards were declared as usual in March-April. Salary hikes and promotions too were rolled out across all levels...

How far has your business returned to normal?
Apart from the initial days of the lockdown, when there was restricted movement in terms of people and supplies, things have returned to normal and we have been quite busy. We scaled up our operations and supplies of Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), Dexamethasone, Remdac (

Remdesvir

), which was completely backward integrated. Our marketing teams have launched products from immunity boosters to sanitisers. We are also re-purposing drugs like Pegylated Interferon Alpha 2b and are conducting trials to see if they can be used for Covid-19. We also developed a vaccine, which is now in adaptive clinical trials.

What challenges has the new normal posed?
We believe the challenge that we set for ourselves is to see in how many different ways can we support people. We have been upscaling production, exploring new research programmes, going digital in our interfaces, and supporting patients and doctors in every way possible, and doing all of this in accelerated response time.

Has Covid impacted remuneration, resulted in downsizing?
There’s been no impact on remuneration. In fact, our performance rewards were declared as usual in March-April and we rolled out salary increases and even promotions across all levels. There’s been no downsizing of operations — we have actually added people in manufacturing.

Updates on vaccine trials...
Our vaccine candidate, ZyCoV-D has completed phase-2 clinical trials. Depending on the outcome and approvals from regulators, we hope to be ready with the vaccine by March 2021. Another

vaccine candidate

developed by our research team in Italy, which is a measles vector-based candidate, is currently in pre-clinical studies at our Vaccine Technology Centre in Ahmedabad.