Oxford scientists are urging the widespread adoption of their manufacturing strategy for the AstraZeneca vaccine as a model for future global vaccine supply, as AstraZeneca announces it has now released two billion doses of the vaccine.
In a paper published in the journal Biotechnology and Bioengineering, the researchers explain how it was possible to produce so much of the vaccine in less than a year, when up until 2020, the University had never manufactured more than a few thousand doses of any one vaccine.
The team puts their success down to the invention of simple manufacturing method that they made just before the pandemic began. It was this method that enabled the rapid scaling up of vaccine manufacturing in 15 countries around the world, reaching people across seven continents. The team says this approach provides a template for faster and more equitable supply of other vaccines in future.
Dr Sandy Douglas, who leads the team that invented the approach, said:
When the pandemic began, we were deeply concerned we’d have no way of getting this vaccine out of the University labs and into the real world. The answer came in three steps.
First, in January and February 2020, we found a simpler way of manufacturing large amounts of this type of vaccine. The simplicity has been key, because it made it possible to make the vaccine in existing factories with existing equipment.
We immediately took the second step, which was to persuade manufacturers with suitable factories in the UK, Europe, India and China to start preparing to make the vaccine, even before it had been given to the first volunteer in the clinical trial. We were worried that poorer countries would be at the back of the queue for COVID vaccines, so we developed a plan to ‘franchise’ the manufacturing to many sites around the world. With a franchised product, huge amounts are made to the same recipe in many countries. That is standard in many industries, but it had never been tried before for a brand-new vaccine.
The third vital step was the University’s partnership with AstraZeneca in May 2020. It was critical for us to have a partner which had the resources to ramp up manufacturing at an industrial scale and share our priority of global equitable access. AstraZeneca’s willingness to do that has been fantastic.
If the pandemic had started even two months earlier, we wouldn’t have had a manufacturing process. Without a manufacturing process I think we would have struggled to persuade a major company like AstraZeneca that our vaccine was more than an academic curiosity. Without a partner, the vaccine would never have begun to reach the people who need it.
The new method involves ‘feeding’ a specific mix of nutrients to the cells that make the vaccine, allowing more vaccine to be made in each batch. This avoids the need for complex equipment previously necessary for the development of adenovirus-based vaccines (which use virus particles that have been altered so they can’t make you sick).
Together with AstraZeneca’s adoption of the team’s ‘franchise’ technology transfer model, this has enabled the production of the vaccine at a scale that could meet global demand in a way never seen before.
The AstraZeneca vaccine has been supplied to more than 170 countries across seven continents. Around two-thirds have gone to low- and lower-middle-income countries, including more than 170 million doses delivered to 130 countries through the COVAX Facility.
Sir John Bell, Regius Professor of Medicine at the University of Oxford said:
This paper shows a side of the University’s vaccine work which has not yet been widely reported. Manufacturing may not be seen as glamorous but the number of doses made, and where they are made, determines how much impact a vaccine can have in the real world. I think millions of people around the world owe their lives to the two billion doses produced as a result of this collaboration between our researchers and AstraZeneca.
Pam Cheng, Executive Vice President, Global Operations and IT at AstraZeneca, said:
Producing two billion doses of the vaccine in less than 12 months after the first approval would not have been possible without the collective effort of so many: our AstraZeneca colleagues globally, our partners at the University of Oxford, our network of contract manufacturers, international organisations and governments around the world. We are extremely proud of this important milestone and the hard work goes on as we continue to accelerate our output to continue to play a key role in helping to end the pandemic.