Are there bioreactors in Italy to produce Covid vaccines?
Producing anti Covid vaccines in Italy will not be easy: there are no bioreactors, facts and insights
The road to produce vaccines in Italy is all uphill (and unpaved).
In our country there are no bioreactors. Better, those that exist are busy, the one in Reithera is not suitable for mass production and getting new ones to arrive is not easy (and not even fast). On Thursday 25 February, the Minister of Economic Development Giancarlo Giorgetti and the President of Farmindustria Massimo Scaccabarozzi will try to find a solution, at the invitation of the European Union, who will meet at Mise.
Let's go step by step.
INTENTIONS
The Prime Minister Mario Draghi asked Giorgetti to meet Massimo Scaccabarozzi, who last Saturday, writes Repubblica , instructed the Minister for Economic Development to test the ground to understand what are the margins for starting the production of vaccines already authorized. The operation will also be followed by Health Minister Roberto Speranza and Economy Minister Daniele Franco.
THE FIRST INVESTIGATIONS
And it was Speranza who had already asked the extraordinary commissioner for the emergency Domenico Arcuri to look for production plants in our country. Aifa, the drug agency, is also moving to find a solution.
AN EU REQUEST
A solution that the European Union also wants to find soon. If Italy, in fact, will produce antiCovid vaccines, it certainly will not do so only in the name of our country. The doses, writes Repubblica , will in fact be redistributed throughout the continent and we will be entitled to 13.6% of the total.
AN Uphill Road
However, the road to producing vaccines is all uphill. On Thursday "we will take stock of the situation on the possibilities of lending a hand," said Scaccabarozzi, who is also president of Janssen Italia. “We will tell the minister how a vaccine is produced and when: a vaccine is a live product, not a synthetic one, it must be treated in a particular way. It must have a bioreaction inside a machine called a bioreactor. In short, it's not like you press a button and the vial comes out. 4-6 months pass from when a production starts ”.
BIOREACTORS ARE MISSING
And it is the bioreactors that need to be solved. According to what Rino Rappuoli, coordinator of research on monoclonal antibodies of Toscana Life Sciences and scientific director of GSK admitted, “we need to know what we want to produce. There are two phases, the first is the production of the substance, the vaccine itself: that is, I produce the RNA, or the protein, the chimpanzee virus, depending on the vaccines. To do this, bioreactors are needed but there are no plants in Italy, ”Rappuoli told Ansa.
“Only GSK has them, but not for the Covid vaccine, but for the one against meningitis which is bacterial. Reithera has it but I don't think to make millions of doses. The second phase concerns the filling and we have many companies able to do it ”, explains Rappuoli.
LONG TIMES
Times are also not short. “If we were to think, for example, of adapting Gsk's bioreactors for the production of anti-Covid vaccines, we would not be able to imagine an operation in no time. Among other things, this would mean ceasing to produce the meningitis vaccine, ”said Rappuoli.
Even starting a production from the beginning is certainly not easy. "However, we must take into account that we need the standard and approval first of the EMA and then of the AIFA and the times would not be short," said Rappuoli. “But there could be another way: the transfer to Italy of the technology already developed by Pfizer or Astrazeneca for example, and in this case it would take from 7-8 months to a year. While starting from scratch with the plants, it would take 2 years to get to production ".
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/sanita/in-italia-ci-sono-bioreattori-per-produrre-vaccini-anti-covid/ on Tue, 23 Feb 2021 10:48:57 +0000.