Biontech provided the latest evidence of the ambitious expansion plans last week with the announcement that it would build a state-of-the-art production facility for mRNA-based vaccines in Rwanda in cooperation with the Rwandan government and the Pasteur de Dakar Institute.
Construction is scheduled to begin in mid-2022 and is described by the Mainz-based company as the next step on the way to a “sustainable end-to-end solution for vaccine supply on the African continent”. “Our goal is to develop vaccines in the African Union and to build up sustainable vaccine production capacities in order to jointly improve medical care in Africa,” said company boss Ugur Sahin.
Just a few weeks earlier, US competitor Moderna announced that it would also build an mRNA vaccine production facility in Africa and invest 500 million dollars for it. According to the US company, the goal is to create capacities for the production of up to 500 million cans annually. In this case, the location has not yet been determined. He expects to produce Covid vaccines as well as other mRNA vaccines there, announced company boss Stephane Bancel.
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The vaccine developers’ two Africa projects are likely to be motivated, at least to a certain extent, to take the wind out of the sails of demands for the release of patents and the transfer of technological knowledge. The supply of Covid vaccines to the African continent is still considered to be inadequate, and the two leading players in the Covid vaccine sector, in particular Moderna, are often accused of producing too few vaccines for low-income countries in general.
Lush financial reserves
But regardless of such considerations, the projects also fit into the global expansion strategies of the biotech climbers. Both companies started with the long-term goal of becoming leading biopharmaceutical companies worldwide. The success of the Covid vaccines has accelerated this development enormously and also gives the mRNA specialists extensive financial resources. Both companies are heading for around $ 20 billion in sales this year. Moderna said it had $ 15 billion in cash reserves at the beginning of September. Reserves of a comparable or even larger dimension should also accumulate at Biontech in the next few quarters.
For the Mainz-based company, the project in Africa is already the third own production project since the start of Covid vaccine development last year. This primarily includes the plant in Marburg, which was acquired by Novartis in 2020, then retrofitted and is now in full swing. In June, Biontech also announced the construction of its own plant in Singapore, which should go into operation in 2023.
In addition, there is the extensive production network that the Mainz-based company has built up as part of the Covid vaccine alliance with the US company Pfizer. In addition to the Biontech plants in Mainz, Marburg and Idar-Oberstein, it includes a whole range of Pfizer production systems as well as various external contract manufacturers and sub-suppliers.
As part of their cooperation, Biontech and Pfizer have also agreed production alliances for the manufacture of the Covid vaccine with the South African pharmaceutical company Biovac and the Brazilian company Eurofarma.
Outside of the Covid activities, Biontech recently strengthened itself by taking over a research and production facility of the US company Gilead in Gaithersburg in the US state of Maryland. In this case, however, it is not about vaccines, but about cell therapies.
Moderna, meanwhile, has mainly relied on its own mRNA production facilities in Cambridge in the US state of Massachusetts and on an extensive production alliance with the Swiss contract manufacturer Lonza, which supplies the US company’s Covid vaccine in Spain, Switzerland and the Netherlands, among others produced.
Such a strong commitment to production is unusual for young biotech companies. As a rule, such companies initially only rely on contract manufacturers or partners from the pharmaceutical industry. Only a few industry pioneers such as Amgen or Biogen have built up their own global production structures over the course of decades.
Special situation due to Covid
Compared to the vast majority of biotech companies, Moderna and Biontech are in a special situation. On the one hand, their globalization in production is simply driven by the enormous demand for Covid vaccines. Because the two mRNA-based vaccines have de facto established themselves as leading products and are more likely to gain market share compared to other vaccines, such as the Chinese Covid vaccines. The planned production volumes of approximately four billion doses this year and more than six billion doses in the coming year, as well as the associated business volume, significantly exceed the previous global vaccine market of approximately 35 billion dollars.
On the other hand, the technology ultimately forced production to be set up. Active ingredients from mRNA represent a new class of substances that was not even established in the pharmaceutical sector before 2021. There were therefore no established manufacturing processes or contract manufacturers that the biotech companies could have resorted to. Long before the Covid pandemic, Biontech and Moderna therefore had to set up their own production facilities to manufacture the active ingredients for their clinical studies.
Another driver behind the expansion plans are the ambitious development strategies. In addition to the Covid vaccines, both companies are already pursuing more than a dozen other clinical research projects and want to use their mRNA technology platform to develop new vaccines and other drugs on a broad front. These include various vaccines, which are particularly badly needed in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia. In this respect, you can hope to utilize your new capacities with additional products when the Covid boom subsides again.
More: Moderna is probably stronger than Biontech when it comes to vaccination