APA – Kigali (Rwanda) The Gates Foundation has hosted President Paul Kagame of Rwanda Bill Gates and Zimbabwean philanthropist tycoon Strive Masiyiwa and other leaders at a roundtable in New York to discuss how mRNA vaccine technology can reduce vaccine manufacturing costs, local media reported Wednesday in Kigali.
Vaccines are one of the most important tools in public health and play an important role in infectious diseases control.
Vaccines save six million lives every year and are one of the major responsible for the increase of human longevity.
mRNA vaccines are reaching the stoplight as a new alternative to conventional vaccines.
mRNA vaccines are being studied in the clinic to treat a number of diseases including cancer, HIV, influenza and even genetic disorders.
Unlike attenuated or inactivated vaccines, mRNA is precise as it will only express a specific antigen and induce a directed immune response. Additionally, it promotes both humoral and cellular immune response and induces the innate immune system.
Compared with DNA-based vaccines, mRNA is more effective, since expression does not require nuclear entry, and safer, since the probability of random genome integration is virtually zero.
The increased demand for mRNA vaccines requires a technology platform and cost-effective manufacturing process with a well-defined product characterisation.
Large scale production of mRNA vaccines consists in a 1 or 2-step in vitro reaction followed by a purification platform with multiple steps that can include Dnase digestion, precipitation, chromatography or tangential flow filtration.
However, there are challenges and bottlenecks of manufacturing that need to be addressed to turn this new vaccination technology into an effective, fast and cost-effective response to emerging health crises.
The manufacturing of new vaccines is typically a lengthy (6 to 36 months), challenging and expensive process, as no standard process is available.
To deliver effective, precise, and consistent vaccines it is imperative to use good manufacturing practice (GMP) compliant equipment, facilities, and procedures.
However, this is costly and difficult to implement at a large scale. Vaccines developed on the basis of traditional technology have failed to respond effectively to several diseases, such as malaria, tuberculosis, AIDS or flu.
Furthermore, SARS and Ebola epidemic outbreaks and, more recently, the CODVID-19 pandemic, show that many of the current platforms are not well suited for a very fast, efficient, and cost-effective response.
CU/as/APA