Covid-19 manufacturing roundup: Bharat Biotech turns to other producers to up supply; Brazil, Argentina land mRNA regional hubs

2021-09-23

疫苗合作信使RNA

Bharat Biotech is ready to start manufacturing doses of its Covid-19 vaccine Covid-19 vaccine — named Covaxin — at an associate firm’s Manjari site, Business-Standard reported Wednesday. The BioVet plant was acquired from a Merck subsidiary as that company left its India operations behind. Right now, engineering batches are being run to test the equipment’s functionality, a source told the outlet. The company is likely to produce 55 million doses of the jab amount by October. In August, there were 35 million doses manufactured. Animal vaccine maker Hester Biosciences is also ready to help in the efforts. The company is setting up a site in Gujarat, which is set to be ready by the start of 2022 and will be able to manufacture 7 million doses a month. Bharat Biotech has also expanded its capacity in Hyderabad and Bangalore to reach 700 million doses a year. The expansion is feasible due to the availability of new BSL-3 facilities that have been repurposed, similar to Hester’s. This week, the company announced that it completed Phase II/III trials of Covaxin in children between the ages of 2 and 18. Data will be submitted to regulators next week. Covaxin is an intranasal vaccination, which creates an immune response in the nose, the point of entry of the virus. South America is getting two new regional hubs to develop mRNA-based Covid-19 vaccines after the Pan American Health Organization picked two centers in Brazil and Argentina. The sites will use their already-existing manufacturing capacity with technology transferred from Moderna. The Bio-Manguinhos Institute of Technology on Immunobiologicals at Fiocruz in Brazil got the nod thanks to its history with vaccine making, and private biopharma Sinergium Biotech will partner with mAbxience to develop and manufacture active ingredients. The announcement comes at a time when vaccines are in dire need in central America. Argentina and Brazil’s efforts have rapidly improved lately, with 65% and 69% of its respective residents receiving at least one shot, but many other countries in the region have fallen behind. The Americas branch of the WHO said vaccine manufacture should benefit the entire region, with distribution funded by PAHO, Reuters reported . Moderna will not enforce patents related to its shots, but it can be difficult to copy a vaccine manufacturing process without explicit instructions as to how it’s made.

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