The governments of developing countries should give greater assurance to vaccine manufacturers investing in mRNA technology that they will purchase the shots they produce, the head of the Medicines Patent Pool (MPP) said on Tuesday.
“If low- and middle-income countries want regional production, they have to be ready to buy the product. They cannot be off to the side: their part of the deal is providing the demand,” MPP executive director Charles Gore said on the sidelines of a meeting of the mRNA vaccine technology transfer programme in Cape Town.
Gore’s remarks have particular resonance for SA, as last year the health department dumped state-backed vaccine manufacturer Biovac in favour of Cipla SA, which was able to source cheaper pneumococcal shots from India.
The mRNA vaccine technology transfer programme was established by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the MPP at the height of the coronavirus pandemic to boost developing countries’ capacity to manufacture life-saving Covid-19 vaccines.
Multinational pharmaceutical firms, including Pfizer and Moderna, had declined to provide the know-how to other companies to replicate their vaccines.
However scientists at the Medical Research Council’s Antiviral Gene Therapy Research Unit at the University of the Witwatersrand used the publicly available genetic sequence of Moderna’s mRNA Covid-19 vaccine, to help Cape Town-based Afrigen Biologics make its own, dubbed AfriVac 2121.
This knowledge is now being shared with 15 vaccine manufacturers in low and middle-income countries, including SA’s Biovac.
Other African participants include Kenya’s Biovax, Egypt’s BioGeneric Pharma, Senegal’s Institut Pasteur, Nigeria’s Biovaccines and Tunisia’s Pasteur Institute. Vaccine manufacturers in Europe, Asia and Latin America are also participating in the programme.
The vaccine manufacturers have started out building their own mRNA Covid-19 vaccine manufacturing capacity and are expected to then develop new mRNA human vaccines that meet regional needs.
Funding
Eleven manufacturers are on track to manufacture mRNA vaccines for human use by 2030 “if suitably funded” said the WHO’s head of vaccine research, Martin Friede.
It was vital for governments to procure the shots these companies produced so they could sustain their costs, scale up production capacity, and be in a position to respond to the next pandemic, he said.
Analysis of cumulative mRNA vaccine production over an 18-month period after the declaration of a new pandemic indicated the network could initially produce 60-million doses a year of a “pandemic response” vaccine, and rapidly increase to up to 2-billion doses a year, he said.
A key aspect of the mRNA vaccine technology transfer programme is developing local capacity to make the active drug substance used in the vaccines, rather than bottling imported ingredients, said MPP technology transfer director Ike James.
An SA consortium that includes Biovac, Afrigen and the SA Medical Research Council is looking at potential mRNA vaccines to prevent tuberculosis, HIV, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), Rift Valley fever and gonorrhoea, he said.
Vaccine manufactures have started out with mRNA vaccines against Covid-19 because there are commercially available shots against which they can be compared, he said.
Vaccine manufacturers that successfully develop novel mRNA vaccines are expected to share their intellectual property with the MPP, which will then provide technology transfer to other programme participants.
Correction: November 20 2024
An earlier version of this story failed to acknowledge the role scientists at the Antivirual Gene Therapy Unit played in developing the Afrivac 2121 Covid-19 vaccine.
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