(This story originally appeared in on Apr 12, 2020)

NEW DELHI: The Union science and technology ministry will fund a Pune-based firm to develop a vaccine for Covid-19 which is expected to enter phase-1 trial in 18-20 months. Seagull Biosolutions is the first company the government is financially backing for coronavirus vaccine efforts. It will also produce at-home test kits for Covid-19 that can detect even asymptomatic infections.For both purposes, Seagull will use its existing Active Virosome Technology (AVT) which can develop novel Active Virosome agents to induce antibodies. The firm is developing two kinds of agents to produce 19 types of neutralising antibodies. While the first agent will express the S protein — which mediates attachment of the virus to the host cell surface receptors — the other will express structural proteins of Covid-19.The company will conduct tests on wild mice to check efficacy of the two AV agents. The next round of tests would be on mice models of SARS disease and later on monkeys or another small animal. The AV-vaccine agent will then be prepared for phase-1 clinical trials.Vishwas Joshi, founder and MD of the firm, told TOI that their AVT platform has previously been used to develop vaccines for ebola, zika, chikungunya and dengue.