In South Africa
Aspen Pharmacare, one of the few serious pharmaceutical players in Africa before Covid, received an infusion of $30 million in philanthropic funds to build up a production process for four of the main childhood vaccines, including shots for pneumonia and rotavirus.
In 2021, the World Health Organization set up an “mRNA production hub” at a small biotechnology company in Cape Town called Afrigen Biologics and Vaccines, with the goal of reverse-engineering the Moderna Covid vaccine and then sharing mRNA production knowledge across the global south. Afrigen will put its Covid shot into clinical trials in early 2024. There is no longer a market for Covid vaccines, but the hope is that the process of designing, testing and producing this product will build up technological know-how to make others including an mRNA shot for tuberculosis, an Afrigen priority.
Afrigen’s production partner is the nearby BioVac Institute, which makes childhood vaccines for South Africa. BioVac signed a deal to bottle Pfizer’s Covid vaccine (a process called fill-finish), and has a new licensing and technology transfer deal to produce an oral cholera vaccine with the International Vaccine Institute, a South Korean nonprofit.
In Rwanda
Six shipping containers arrived in the country in mid-March to form the first “BioNTainer, — a pop-up mRNA vaccine manufacturing line packaged in the containers — donated by BioNTech, the maker of the mRNA technology in Pfizer’s Covid vaccine. The modular site is intended to form the core of a new vaccine manufacturing center. It will be staffed by Europeans for the first five years, according to BioNTech.
A key challenge here, Dr. Yadav noted, is that the site has no vaccine to make: There is no demand for the Covid vaccine, and BioNTech does not currently make any other product. A malaria or tuberculosis mRNA vaccine that could be useful for Rwanda and the region is most likely a decade away. The new capacity in the country is only for production; in Rwanda, as in most other African countries, there is no biotech industry capable of the kind of research and development that is essential when responding to a new pathogen, said Alain Alsalhani, a vaccines expert with Doctors Without Borders’ access-to-medicines campaign.
And beyond
Two more companies — Biogeneric Pharma in Egypt, which will receive an mRNA technology transfer from Afrigen, and SENSYO Pharmatech in Morocco — have received significant investment to expand their production. And in Kenya, the government is having the Kenya BioVax Institute switch from producing animal vaccines to making human ones. It has tapped Dr. Michael Lusiola, an expatriate Kenyan who was a senior executive with AstraZeneca in the United Kingdom, to come home and run it.
