‘All of the enzymes are made in bacteria. Moderna and BioNTech are reticent on manufacturing specifics, but in general a polymerase follows a DNA template to make the mRNA sequence by linking nucleotides together. Large-scale production of such a vaccine has never happened before. The Vaccines Manufacturing and Innovation Centre will be the UK’s first national vaccines manufacturing and innovation facility mRNA bottlenecksīioNTech–Pfizer’s vaccine is the first mRNA vaccine ever to be approved for people by the FDA. Source: © Richard Pohle/WPA Pool/Getty Images Vaccine developers are also adapting existing facilities and partnering with sometime rivals to take advantage of their manufacturing capacity and expertise. Last weekend the British government announced an additional £47.6 million to get the UK Vaccine Manufacturing and Innovation Centre being built at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus, online even sooner. Building additional capacity is one way companies and governments are approaching the challenge. And as Matt Hancock, the UK’s health secretary, told the House of Commons on 18 March ‘the process of manufacturing vaccines is complicated, and subject to unpredictability’.Įach vaccine faces production issues the newer technologies are effectively starting from scratch. But those companies that have surmounted the challenges of development now face the next phase: manufacturing doses on an enormous scale. Hot on their heels are rivals based on adenovirus vectors from AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, as well as Sputnik V from Russia.Įarly successes in developing vaccines by upstarts like Moderna and BioNTech papered over the struggles of vaccine heavyweights like Merck, GSK and Sanofi. By December 2020, these two had become the first vaccines to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The mRNA candidate from BioNTech and Pfizer followed in April. The first Covid-19 vaccine candidate went into the arms of volunteers in Seattle in March 2020.

Moderna vaccine production facility