Dive short:
- Sanofi will help manufacture more than 100 million doses of Pfizer and BioNTech’s coronavirus vaccine, and will agree to provide production capacity to partner companies following setbacks and delays in the development of its own vaccine candidates.
- The additional doses will only be used to supply countries in the European Union, a company spokesman confirmed to BioPharma Dive, with initial deliveries expected by August. Sanofi will use a plant in Frankfurt, Germany, to fill and package bottles of Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine.
- Pfizer and BioNTech said they could produce about 2 billion doses this year, but demand far exceeded supply as vaccination campaigns began in the US, UK and Europe. Earlier this month, the companies briefly reduced production at Pfizer’s plant in Puurs, Belgium, to increase their production.
Dive insight:
Sanofi’s agreement is an unusual collaboration between companies that would normally be competitors and reflects the urgency to quickly produce more vaccine doses.
However, the deal is temporary, with Sanofi’s promising ability at the Frankfurt plant just for this year.
“We have shifted activities across sites to temporarily produce more than 100 million doses of BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine,” a company spokesman said. “This is the maximum we can achieve in this time frame with the industrial capabilities we have available.”
Le Figaro, a French newspaper, reported the news for the first time, referring to an interview with Sanofi CEO Paul Hudson.
The timing overlaps with a window that Sanofi has, while its own coronavirus development work progresses through earlier stages.
Sanofi, along with partner GlaxoSmithKline, is currently planning to launch a major trial later this year to test their protein-based vaccine candidate. If the study succeeds, companies expect the vaccine to be available by the fourth quarter.
The timeline represents a delay of as much as six months from the initial forecasts of Sanofi and GSK. The results of an early stage of vaccination of the vaccine were faint, which forced companies to switch to a new formulation that they say could boost a stronger immune response.
Sanofi is also working with Translate Bio to develop another vaccine that uses messenger RNA, but the development is much earlier. The initial testing in humans is expected to begin this term.
With a handful of vaccines now available in different countries around the world, some have asked producers who are not involved, or are further behind, to develop their own vaccine to help those who succeed. Sanofi’s agreement is the most important example that emerges.
This week, Merck & Co. announced that they would stop developing two coronavirus vaccine candidates they had tested after both underperformed in trials. However, the company told Bloomberg that it would “re-instrument” some of its manufacturing facilities to obtain an experimental COVID-19 treatment it had recently acquired.