While some of the initial zeal around localized vaccine production in Africa has waned since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, efforts to bolster the continent’s immunization autonomy—especially around newer technologies like mRNA—continue to take shape.
To that end, Egypt's EVA Pharma, France’s DNA Script and Belgium’s Quantoom Biosciences on Wednesday unveiled a new collaboration to develop a “digital-to-biologics, end-to-end mRNA production platform." If successful, the platform could pitch in on the Africa CDC’s goal to boost local vaccine production to 60% of the region's demand by 2040, the partners said in a press release.
The partners hope their platform will tackle both nucleic-acid-based vaccines and therapeutics, including those that leverage messenger RNA (mRNA) and self-amplifying RNA (saRNA) technologies. The overall goal of the project is to enable rapid responses to infectious disease outbreaks and bolster routine immunizations, both in humans and animals.
Apart from manufacturing, the partners said they also plan to develop next-generation saRNA-based vaccines for both human and animal health.
Under the partners’ current strategy, the production platform will wed DNA Script’s enzymatic DNA synthesis technologies with Quantoom’s proprietary tech for mRNA synthesis and formulation. Meanwhile, EVA Pharma will lend its vaccine development know-how plus its sterile manufacturing and marketing capabilities.
Should the collaboration bear fruit, the partners aim to be able to produce 100 million doses of RNA-based vaccines each year.
Apart from the Africa CDC’s 60% local vaccine production target, the collaboration is also expected to chip in toward Egypt’s goal to manufacture 385 million vaccine doses annually by 2030, according to Wednesday’s release.
As concerns around vaccine equity came to the fore during the COVID-19 pandemic, health organizations and individual companies alike stepped up with plans to bring production autonomy to Africa. Ultimately, some of those efforts have fared better than others.
Back in 2023, the World Health Organization opened an mRNA vaccine hub in Cape Town, South Africa, tapping local biotech Afrigen Biologics for a pilot project focused on making a homegrown mRNA vaccine using the publicly available sequence of Moderna’s shot Spikevax.
Meanwhile, BioNTech, which opened a Rwandan mRNA vaccine plant in the country’s capital of Kigali in late 2023, said last year that it planned to expand the site with help from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). As with the team-up unveiled this week, BioNTech and the CEPI said last May that their goal with the expansion is to create an end-to-end vaccine ecosystem in Africa.
Similar efforts by U.S.-based mRNA specialist Moderna have struggled to take off, however, with the company announcing last April that it had paused plans to build a $500 million production plant in Kenya. At the time, Moderna noted that it hadn’t received any vaccine orders from Africa since 2022 and that cancellations of previous orders had amounted to more than $1 billion in losses and write-downs.
Elsewhere, Quantoom in early December struck a similar partnership with the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) and Univercells to expand production of mRNA vaccines and drugs in Brazil and beyond. The partners plan to build out a commercial facility in Brazil that will integrate the same Quantoom tech involved in this week's deal.