BioNTech plans to increase its manufacturing capacity in Africa over time through the supplementation of new manufacturing lines and construction of additional manufacturing sites.
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German biotech company BioNTech announced Tuesday that it has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Rwandan government and the Institut Pasteur de Dakar of Kigali, Rwanda in regards to the construction of Africa’s first state-of-the-art mRNA vaccine manufacturing facility.
This was preceded by a Joint Communiqué signed August of last year in which BioNTech agreed to evaluate the potentiality of sustainable vaccine manufacturing capabilities in Rwanda and Senegal.
“I would like to thank all participants of today’s meeting for the support and trust to establish the first mRNA manufacturing facility within the African Union. Together, we will work on developing a regional manufacturing network to support the access to vaccines manufactured in Africa, for Africa,” said BioNTech CEO and co-founder, Ugur Sahin, M.D., CEO. “Our goal is to develop vaccines in the African Union and to establish sustainable vaccine production capabilities to jointly improve medical care in Africa. We have made great progress in the past few weeks, which will help us on our way to turn these plans into reality.”
Vaccine supply has been the chief obstacle in Africa’s fight to end COVID-19. African countries have yet to vaccinate more than 10% of their population against the viral illness. Sustainable end-to-end vaccine manufacturing would go quite a long way in the struggle to supply the residents of Earth’s second-largest continent with COVID-19 and perhaps other mRNA vaccines.
Exactly which COVID-19 vaccine will be turned out by Africa’s first mRNA vaccine manufacturing facility is still up for prediction, however, as BioNTech’s statement comes almost three weeks after Moderna’s announcement that it plans to invest up to $500 million in the construction of its own state-of-the-art facility in Africa.
With a goal of producing up to 500 million doses of 50ug vaccines per year, Moderna’s mRNA facility appears to have a more propitious future. BioNTech, through its partnership with Pfizer, is likely to produce its vaccine line, but only intends the first production line to output at a rate of approximately 50 million COVID-19 vaccine doses per year.
BioNTech plans to increase its manufacturing capacity in Africa over time through the supplementation of new manufacturing lines and construction of additional manufacturing sites. The end result would be a manufacturing network expanding across the continent and capable of producing several hundreds of millions of mRNA vaccine doses per year.
Additionally, this staggered timetable for manufacturing development is designed to lend expedience to the initial setup of production while remaining adherent to the Good Manufacturing Practice standards outlined by the World Health Organization. This will allow BioNTech to initiate construction of its mRNA vaccine manufacturing facility as soon as mid-2022.
While Moderna also announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding this morning to supply up to 110 million doses of its vaccine to the African Union, discussions are still ongoing for the construction of a manufacturing facility in Africa. Furthermore, Moderna’s plans for an mRNA vaccine manufacturing facility won’t see it producing doses of its COVID-19 vaccine on the continent any earlier than 2023.
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