Burioni stings Hope on vaccines
Pointed tweet from virologist Roberto Burioni on vaccine production in Italy …
Maybe it was time to come up with this brilliant idea in November when we learned we had two monstrously effective vaccines and not at the end of February. 4 months given away to the virus, hundreds of deaths a day. Who is to blame for this intolerable delay? https://t.co/RmTNusjoMj
– Roberto Burioni (@RobertoBurioni) February 22, 2021
Are there bioreactors in Italy to produce Covid vaccines?
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ANSA POINT ON BIOREACTORS FOR VACCINES IN ITALY
There has been talk of producing vaccines against Covid in Italy for months. Now the hypothesis lands on the Mise table where on Thursday there will be a meeting between the minister of economic development Giancarlo Giorgetti and the president of Farmindustria Massimo Scaccabarozzi. Explaining the complexity of the production process will be one of the key steps envisaged by the president of Farmindustria.
“We will take stock of the situation on the possibilities of helping out”, said Scaccabarozzi, “we will tell the minister how a vaccine is produced and what the timing is: 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 ”. Indeed, the crux of production is precisely the bioreactors. This was also underlined by Rino Rappuoli, father of many new generation vaccines, coordinator of research on monoclonal antibodies of Toscana Life Sciences and scientific director of GSK. To produce anti-Covid vaccines in Italy, “we need to know what we want to produce. There are two phases – he explained – the first concerns 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 in Italy there are no plants ”. And he clarified, “only GSK has them, but not for the anti-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 in Italy many companies are able to do it ".
“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 ”. All this, however, does not mean that we cannot think of setting up plants with bioreactors in Italy: "However, we must take into account that we need the standard and approval first of the EMA and then of the AIFA – added Rappuoli – and they wouldn't be short ". “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 ". Too long times. Meanwhile, the daily update on the number of vaccines administered in Italy records that the inoculated doses have exceeded 3.5 million. At 3 pm the figure was 3,537,975. The vaccinated with two doses, including the booster, are now 1,332,163.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/sanita/burioni-punge-speranza-sui-vaccini/ on Tue, 23 Feb 2021 15:22:55 +0000.