The transition from manufacturing vaccines in smaller quantities required for academic research to the mass production that is required to protect the global population can be a daunting task. In this article, we discuss key challenges related to the large-scale production of vaccines and also highlight ways to overcome these.
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The process of manufacturing viral vector and whole virus vaccines presents a challenge to President Joe Biden’s plans to ramp up production by waiving patent protections for COVID-19 vaccines.
Biden floated the idea last Wednesday, angering pharmaceutical companies in the process. Supporters of the proposal believe it would remove a major obstacle to letting the developing world manufacture generic versions of vaccines.
But the impediment may not be intellectual property rights but rather a lack of facilities and expertise.
“There are not that many places that are fully operational and have the human resources that are qualified to operate this kind of technology,” said professor Amine Kamen, the Canada research chairman in bioprocessing of viral vaccines at McGill University.
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The difficulty of learning the technology behind mRNA vaccines poses a major obstacle to President Joe Biden s proposal aiding poor countries by defying the pharmaceutical industry and waiving patent protections for COVID-19 vaccines.
The rationale for the patent waiver would be to allow developing countries to reproduce currently existing COVID-19 vaccines without having to worry about getting sued by the pharmaceutical companies that hold the patents.
But in the case of the mRNA vaccines produced by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, doing so would be very difficult. As of March, mRNA vaccines accounted for 43% of the COVID-19 vaccines produced, according to British software company Airfinity.