Earlier this month, he said there was a “need for vaccine manufacturing capacity in every global region as an insurance policy against the type of vaccine nationalism that saw Africa deprived of Covid-19 vaccines in the early days of the pandemic.”
He went on: “Building sustainable African vaccine manufacturing is a non-negotiable objective of Africa.”
Currently only one per cent of vaccines used in Africa are made on the continent. The African Union wants that to jump to 60 per cent by 2040 – and schemes like BioNTech’s new Rwanda facility could play a role.
BioNTech’s container labs use the same mRNA technology behind the firm’s hugely successful Covid-19 jab produced with Pfizer.
This vaccine platform delivers purpose-built genetic coding, messenger RNA (mRNA), which, in the case of the Covid virus, instructs the body to recreate a protein spike seen on the outside coat of Sars-CoV-2.
Recognising what appears to be a foreign – but completely harmless – object, the body mounts an immune system and learns how to fight the virus. The memory of this encounter is retained and keeps a vaccinated person protected against the real Sars-CoV-2.
Professors Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman, who developed the technology that led to mRNA vaccines, shared this year’s Nobel prize for medicine.
Covid-19 may have popularised the technology, but BioNTech now has early stage trials underway for mRNA vaccines to counter several other infections, including two of Africa’s biggest killers.
A clinical phase 1 trial for a tuberculosis vaccine is underway in South Africa and malaria vaccine candidates are being evaluated in America. Another early phase trial for monkeypox, or Mpox, vaccine candidates is underway in the United States and UK.
Inside the ‘modular’ lab
If such vaccines are successful, they may one day be made in factories like the new one in Kigali.
The new BioNTech plant in a Kigali industrial estate stretches across eight acres but the heart is a concrete hall containing the modular lab, or what the firm calls its BioNTainer.
Modelled on a prototype assembled in the company’s German plant, in Marburg, the lab assembled in Kigali this week is the first of its kind built in Africa.
The first unit, made of six containers stacked three on three, will create the mRNA active ingredient. Another unit, to be assembled alongside another eight containers early next year, will wrap the mRNA molecule in a protective lipid shell. The formulation will then have to be filled in vials elsewhere.
The units are airtight and kept at higher pressure than the surroundings to make sure no contamination gets in.
They may be sealed, but they are not self-contained. The plant needs electricity and carefully regulated supplies of clean water and air.
Source link : https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/vaccine-biontech-africa-rwanda/
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Publish date : 2023-12-18 08:00:00
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