Vaccine manufacturing systems have undergone evolutionary optimisation over the last 60 years, with occasional disruptions due to new technology (such as mammalian cell cultures replacing egg-based systems for seasonal influenza vaccine manufacture).
The Hub is looking to transform how we manufacture vaccines for developing countries."
Prof Robin Shattock
Director of the Future Vaccine Manufacturing Hub
Global vaccination programmes have been a great success, but the production and distribution systems from vaccines still suffer from costs associated with producing and purifying vaccines and the need to store them between 2 and 8 °C. This can be a challenge in the rural parts of low- and middle-income countries where 24 million children do not have access to appropriate vaccinations every year.
An additional challenge is the need to rapidly respond to new threats, such as the Ebola and Zika viruses, that continue to emerge. The development of a 'first responder' strategy for the latter means that there are two different types of challenges that future vaccine manufacturing systems will have to overcome:
- How to design a flexible modular production system, that once a new threat is identified and sequenced, can switch into manufacturing mode and produce of the order of 10,000 doses in a matter of weeks as part of localised containment strategy?
- How to improve and optimise existing manufacturing processes and change the way vaccines are manufactured, stabilised and stored so that costs are reduced, efficiencies increased, and existing and new diseases prevented effectively?
Key strategies, benefits and impact
Examples of strategies for challenge 1 are RNA vaccines. The significant advantage of synthetic RNA vaccines is the ability to rapidly manufacture many thousands of doses within a matter of weeks. This provides a viable business model not applicable to other technologies with much longer lag phases for production (viral vectors, mammalian cell culture), whereby procurement of the vaccine can be made on a needs basis avoiding the associated costs of stockpiling vaccines for rapid deployment, monitoring their ongoing stability and implementing a cycle of replacement of expired stock.
In addition, low infrastructure and equipment costs make it feasible to establish manufacture in low-income settings, where all required equipment has potential to be run from a generator driven electrical supply in the event of power shortage. This fits the concept of a distributed, flexible platform technology, in that once a threat is identified, the specific genetic code can be provided to the manufacturing process and the doses of the specific vaccine can be produced without delay. Additional concepts that we will explore in this category include the rapid production of yeast and bacterially expressed particles that mimic membrane expressed components of pathogenic viruses and bacteria.
Examples of strategies for challenge 2 build on our work on protein stabilisation which has been shown to preserve the function of delicate protein enzymes at temperatures over 100 °C. We shall exploit this knowledge to develop new vaccine stabilisation and formulation platforms. These can be used in two ways:
- to support the last few miles of delivery from centralised cold chains to patients through reformulation, and
- for direct production of thermally stable forms, i.e. vaccines that retain their activity for months despite being not being refrigerated.
We believe that the best way to deliver these step changes in capability and performance is through a team-based approach that applies deep integration in two dimensions: between UK and LMIC partners to ensure that all the LMIC considerations are "baked in" from the start and between different disciplines accounting for the different expertise that will be required to meet the challenges.
