India’s Serum Institute offers cheap polio vaccine

Indian billionaire Cyrus Poonawalla, founder of the world’s biggest maker of vaccines, will cut the price of polio immunisation and introduce shots for diarrhoea and pneumonia, undercutting Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline. Mr Poonawalla, who set up the Serum Institute of India in 1966, will use last year’s acquisition of a Dutch vaccine business. The injectable form of polio inoculation will be added to the oral drops the Pune, India-based company supplies to organisations such as the United Nations Children’s Fund, he said. The closely held group also plans to sell a low-cost pneumococcal shot to compete with Pfizer’s $4bn Prevnar pneumonia vaccine by 2016. The plan by the Serum Institute, which says it supplies vaccines used to immunise two out of three children worldwide, will “revolutionise” efforts to eradicate polio that affects nerves and results in paralysis, said Bruce Aylward, assistant director-general at the World Health Organisation (WHO). The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,...