Amid being one of the worst-affected Indian cities by the COVID-19 pandemic, Chennai leaps forward with the hope of attaining a major breakthrough in finding a vaccine to treat the viral infection, as one of the top hospitals in the city has begun the human trial for COVID-19 vaccine 'Covaxin' on Thursday. 

Covaxin is India's indigenous vaccine developed by the Hyderabad based Bharat Biotech in collaboration with the National Institute of Virology (NIV), and the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR). If the vaccine has got certification in treating COVID-19, it would a significant medical invention of India, and the vaccine has recently consented by the Drug Controller of India to carry out the human trials. 

The ICMR has already listed out 12 testing sites in India for the human trials and Chennai's SRM Medical College and Research Center is one among them and the hospital has started the human trials on Thursday - July 23, at the crucial time. SRM is the second institute in south India to start human trials on the vaccine after Hyderabad's Nizam's Institute of Medical Sciences. 

According to the Dean of the Medical Research Department of the SRM institute, the healthy people from the age of 18 to 55 are allowed to enroll as a volunteer for the human trials. However, pregnant women are not allowed. 

The first dose of Covaxin was administered on two volunteers on Thursday and the second dose will be injected after 14 days and all the subjects will be observed for a period of 194 days to ascertain whether they have developed antibodies in their bodies to battle the viral infection.

The Dean further stated that the volunteers who were administered with the vaccine would come for the hospital for a checkup every week during which they will be thoroughly tested and their body responses will be reviewed. This would be a routine process that will go for six months and the results and observations of the subjects will be sent for ICMR at regular intervals.

Earlier, the human trials for Covaxin had already begun across India where over 300 volunteers have been administered with the vaccine. PGI Rohtak in Haryana, AIIMS Patna, and NIMS Hyderabad are peers of SRM Institute in this process of the human trail in finding a cure for COVID-19. 

Along with Bharat Biotech's Covaxin, Zydus Cadila's ZyCoV-D vaccine has also got consent from the Drug Controller of India and began its human trials. According to the reports, seven Indian medical firms are in the process of discovering the medicine of which two of them had already started. Last week, PGI Rohtak had reported that its subjects had tolerated well after administered with Covaxin.