According to people with knowledge of the discussions, two of the three largest Covid-19 vaccine manufacturers, Moderna and BioNTech / Pfizer, are rushing to join partners to secure their supply chains. to speed up.
The vaccines have been approved for use in Europe or the US and are now working on distributing orders. Both use messenger RNA technology that is delivered to cells in microscopic oily droplets. Both are 95 percent effective in late-stage clinical trials.
The people said that the current slower-than-expected national vaccination campaigns are caused by distribution problems, rather than by gaps in the supply of components to make the vaccines. Officials in Europe, the US and the UK have acknowledged that vaccination targets have not been met.
Ugur Sahin, CEO of BioNTech, told the German magazine Der Spiegel that BioNTech is trying to find new production partners.
“But it is not as if there are specialized factories around the world that can produce vaccines of the necessary quality,” he said. “At the end of January we will know if and how much more we can produce.”
Pfizer declined to comment. Moderna did not respond to a request for comment.
Andrey Zarur, head of GreenLight Biosciences, said ingredients stored before vaccine approval would deliver the first doses of 1 to 2 billion, but then bottlenecks would appear.
The challenges include obtaining items ranging from DNA molecules to lipid nanoparticles – the microscopic oily droplets that deliver the active mRNA component of the vaccine – he said. “Pfizer and Moderna have kicked off talks with suppliers such as Trilink, Aldevron and New England Biolabs to meet the challenge, but it will require government and deep collaboration across the industry to make it work.”
Moderna and BioNTech / Pfizer are looking for partners who can help them maintain production, especially for the production of lipid nanoparticles, the people said.
Production of lipid nanoparticles takes place in two phases. There is currently a bottleneck in the production of equipment to manufacture the final product, one of the people said.
Supply chain issues are not new in this pandemic. Earlier this year, there were bottlenecks in the PCR tests that are the gold standard for DNA testing as demand rose. Most of the PCR supply chain has now been expanded to meet the increasing demand.
Additional reporting by Joe Miller in Frankfurt