Polio vaccine: Crippled Haffkine fights back

MUMBAI: It''s a public sector unit that lost out to global competition but is fighting to get back into the game.
Last year, Unicef''s tender for supplying oral polio vaccines to India''s polio-eradication programme went international and the two public sector pharma companies which were supplying the vaccines failed to make the grade.
For Haffkine BiopharmaceuticalCorporation Ltd, a 75-year-old government of Maharashtra undertaking with an established reputation, this meant a loss of almost Rs 50 crore since the polio vaccine is its mainstay product.
Haffkine''s annual turnover plummeted from Rs 77.6 crore in 2002-''03 to Rs 29.9 crore in 2003-''04.
India is one of the largest consumers of the oral vaccine, swallowing an estimated 1,150 million doses a year in the battle to be polio-free.
Haffkine has been supplying indigenous oral polio vaccines to the Indian government since 1975, and was the sole supplier for many years. In 1999, it got the Unicef order for India for the World Health Organisation-funded pulse polio immunisation campaign, and produced up to 250 million doses annually.
Until last year, it only had to comply with what is known as ''local WHO good manufacturing practices'' (read: national food and drug administration norms).
However, by the end of 2002, it was informed that its plants had to conform with WHO norms before it could bid for the 2003 tender which was floated from Copenhagen.
"When the WHO officials came on their first inspection round in early 2003, none of the Indian companies which had been supplying vaccines qualified," says Haffkine MD Medha Gadgil.