Drugmaker AstraZeneca’s potential coronavirus vaccine is currently in advanced preliminaries, and the organization says it has the ability to make three billion doses when the vaccine is prepared. In any case, even before the last phase of testing and government approval, the vaccine is on a monstrous manufacturing drive.
“In that particular process you will be making millions of vaccines,” said Pall Corporation’s director of strategy Dr. Clive Glover.
Be that as it may, the challenge is the manner by which to scale from a little vial of vaccine to billions of doses — rapidly.
“That process would generally be measured in years,” Glover said. “And five years is not unusual. We were able to design the process, get our equipment in to one of our manufacturing partners and run the initial process within eight weeks.”
“So it was a sprint, to say the least,” Glover added.
That sprint is currently a relay race — and a biotech lab on the southern coast of England has the baton. The procedure begins by making a little batch of vaccine.
“We grow the cells up in this bioreactor and use a starter version of the vaccine, put that in the bioreactor,” Glover said. “It infects the cells that are growing inside here and allows the vaccine to actually make more of the vaccine itself.”
The rest is a complex filtering process that screens through impurities until they are left with a bagful of vaccines prepared for the vials — and eventually, your arm.
A blueprint will be utilized by makers of the vaccine around the globe, every one of whom are waiting for the go-ahead to begin turning out, ideally in record time.