How New Zealand inspired a leading vaccine maker in India

In the quiet rural town of Dargaville in Northland, a biotechnology facility extracts a pale gold serum from cattle blood - a key ingredient in some of the world's most widely distributed animal vaccines.

Each year, several hundred tonnes of the serum are shipped to laboratories in Hyderabad, India, where hundreds of scientists use it to manufacture vaccines for foot-and-mouth disease and human rabies on a massive scale.

The Northland facility, Pristine Biologicals, is the brainchild of Dr Anand Kumar, managing director of parent company Indian Immunologicals.

Kumar has quickly cemented his place as a leading figure in India's vaccine industry.

What's lesser known is that between 1996 and 2003, he spent many of his formative years in healthcare technology living and working in New Zealand.

Across seven years in Auckland and Wellington, Kumar worked in the fields of microbiology, virology and vaccine research.

It was here that Kumar observed the disease-free status of cattle and realised the potential for developing animal vaccines back in India.

"Serum is nothing but the liquid of blood. If you remove all the red blood cells then the straw-coloured liquid left over is the serum, which has very rich growth promotion properties.

"In New Zealand, there's virgin serum because those animals have never seen diseases like foot-and-mouth."

Indian Immunologicals had sourced serum from New Zealand and Australia for many years with the help of various vendors.

However, rising costs and insufficient quantities meant it was time for the company to take matters into its own hands.

In 2015, a year before taking on the role of managing director, Kumar decided to establish the company's own manufacturing facility in Dargaville near Silver Fern Farms.

"Our consumption of serum is roughly 500 metric tonnes a year, which is a very large quantity, and to get it from one or two vendors is very difficult. What we did [is] called backward integration, where if a company's making a product and there are certain key raw materials being used in the product, it gives us absolute access and control.

"The method is that we get blood from Silver Fern Farms that's brought into our facility, then we process it and ship the serum in minus 20 degrees (Celsius), frozen, to India, and use it for various vaccine manufacturing, whether it be for use in foot-and-mouth disease or in a human rabies vaccine."

Protecting India's milk economy

Indian Immunologicals was born out of India's dairy revolution in 1982 after being established under the National Dairy Development Board.

Kumar says one of the company's biggest goals was to protect India's fragile milk economy from devastating livestock diseases.

"Years ago, when India was deficient in milk and we had to import from outside, there was a desire to make India self-sufficient in the production of milk," he says.

"Our founding fathers realised very early that if you want to increase the production of milk, then you have to control diseases. It's very well-known that vaccines are the most cost-effective intervention to prevent infectious diseases."

Animal vaccines in India were sold by multinational companies at the time, making them very expensive and far beyond the reach of the average dairy farmer.

Indian Immunologicals was established out of a desire to set up local manufacturing in India.

"Unlike in the West, where you have herds of some 200 cows on a farm, here it's about two or three animals per household, so it's very fragmented," Kumar says.

"We got technology from the UK and established a very small plant on the outskirts of Hyderabad then, and now it's the most happening place in the city."

Indian Immunologicals began with a single vaccine for foot-and-mouth disease, and then ventured into making several vaccines for livestock, predominantly cattle, and then sheep and goats, before entering the companion animal space.

The company also runs community-focused initiatives that reflect its roots in public health - a Gift Milk Programme, where nearly 7000 children studying in government schools are given flavoured, fortified milk to drink every day.

"In rural areas many parents do field work, so there's no proper breakfast," Kumar says.

"In India we do have a noon meal scheme, but there's no breakfast, so they can't stand until lunch period. So as soon as they come to school, we give them milk and they can pay attention in class."

In 1998, everything changed when the Indian government requested the purely veterinary vaccine company to produce a human rabies vaccine.

"Rabies is a big problem in India with many dog bite cases, and there was a very crude vaccine derived from sheep brain back in the day. You had to have 14 injections for 14 days, and again, it was very expensive," Kumar says.

"Normally the people who get bitten by dogs are street vendors, they're very poor, so the government asked if we could make a safe vaccine for humans.

"There was a lot of ridicule at the time about how a vaccine for humans will be made by a veterinary vaccine company. Now I'm happy to say we're the largest producer of the human rabies vaccine in the world."

Will Indian Immunologicals ever supply vaccines to NZ?

In 2024, at a ceremony in Auckland, Pristine Immunologicals was presented with two Indian Newslink awards for business excellence in marketing and international trade, with Kumar receiving an additional commemorative award from Prime Minister Christopher Luxon.

Kumar is aware of New Zealand's pursuit of a free trade agreement with India but says the chance of a boost is looking slim for vaccine trade.

"Indian Immunologicals doesn't supply any vaccines to New Zealand currently and I don't think anything will change," he says.

He says New Zealand is not currently on the radar of Indian vaccine manufacturers because of its small market size compared to other Western nations.

"Vaccines are dependent on population, and New Zealand is a very small market. You need to have a reasonably sized market because you're competing with Australia."

* Jogai Bhatt travelled to India with support from the Asia New Zealand Foundation.