How to perform a robust Vaccine Technology Transfer in a challenging era

Since the spread of Covid-19 the entire world had assist to a real boost on pharmaceutical research and development activities, in particular for biotechnology derived substances and vaccines.

Developing and manufacturing a vaccine has some specific issues to be addressed, like:

• Time constraints, as a vaccine should usually be administered prior to the disease main peak
• Safety constraints, because vaccines are administered to healthy people and usually to more fragile categories first;
• Volume constraints, as these products have to be available for the majority of the population in order to be effective.

Vaccines are fast moving products, complex to be developed, moreover in the current pandemic era. Disease’ variants and safety events can be another challenge on top on the intrinsic vaccine’s manufacturing ones.

In addition, thanks to the boost on both resources and R&D activities, another step forward was performed in vaccine manufacturing: a completely brand new category of vaccines exploded on the market, the mRNA vaccines.

mRNA vaccines are manufactured through a completely different technology respect to biotechnological drugs, including classical vaccines, thus posing even more complex challenges regarding their technology transfer.