Context: Recently, the Department of Biotechnology and Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC) had invited applications for COVID-19 Research Consortium to urgently develop safe and effective Biomedical solutions against SARS CoV-2. The move aims to provide an accelerator approach for vaccine development.
Key Points

• Under the research consortium, DBT and BIRAC evaluated applications with an intent to support Industry/ Academia and Jointly Academia & Industry for developing Diagnostics, Vaccines, Novel Therapeutics, Repurposing of Drugs or any other intervention for control of COVID-19.
• Under the move, 70 proposals of devices, diagnostics, vaccine candidates, therapeutics, and other interventions have been recommended for receiving financial support.
• The shortlisted proposals include 10 Vaccines candidates, 34 Diagnostics products or scale-up facilities, 10 Therapeutics options, 2 proposals on Drug Repurposing, and 14 projects which are categorized as preventive interventions.
• The participating candidates have been enhanced by providing support for the development of the Next-generation mRNA vaccine for a lipid encapsulated mRNA based vaccine.
• In order to ensure complete indigenization of COVID diagnostics, DBT BIRAC has already provided support to the companies conducting research to scale-up the production of RT PCR kits.
• BIRAC has created a provision to fund COVID-19 solutions that are ready for immediate deployment under a 'Fast Track Review Process'.
• DBT has also launched a National Biomedical Resource Indigenization Consortium (NBRIC) in a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) model to foster indigenous innovation focused on developing reagents and resources for diagnostics, vaccines, and therapeutics for COVID19 which is in partnership with ABLE and CII and is being hosted by C-CAMP.
• The consortium will be based out of C-CAMP in Bengaluru and aims to provide a collaborative platform to build indigenous biomedical resources towards a self-reliant biotech ecosystem.

Benefits

• It brings together academia, industry, start-ups and MSME to serve not just the country but the world. 
• To meet the Covid-19 challenges, this is a good start and we hope to enlarge this to include all required resources, platforms and facilities
• This will enable us to synergise and optimise the latent capabilities we possess across the pyramid of academic research labs, start-ups, MSMEs and large enterprise to deliver innovative solutions at scale for India and the world