Platform improvement

Platform improvement workstream

Key contributors

  • Imperial College London
  • GSK Vaccines Institute for Global Health (GVGH, Italy)
  • NIBSC
  • LMIC partners
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Challenge and opportunities

Our partners at MSD Wellcome Trust Hilleman Laboratories Pvt. Ltd. (India), Incepta (Bangladesh) VABIOTECH (Vietnam), Dalian Hissen BioPharm (China), GSK Vaccines Institute for Global Health (GVGH, ITALY), NHS Blood & Transplant – Clinical f Biotechnology Centre (NHS BT-CBC, UK), and NIBSC (UK) have platforms for the production of vaccine formulations suitable for LMIC countries. Here, the focus will be how best to exploit and further develop these to:

  • establish and enable modular vaccine manufacturing for mass vaccination campaigns, and
  • tech transfer novel vaccines manufacturing capability to deal effectively with new outbreaks

These tasks require operational efficiency for cost reduction, rapid response of existing assets and end-to-end system design. Bottlenecks typically lie in Life Sciences (where challenges involve host cell system or vector optimisation for improved productivity/quality), and in Engineering (where challenges arise from downstream separations, formulation and packaging). We will apply whole process analysis and optimisation to address these issues holistically.

Methodology

90% of the LMIC vaccine production is attenuated and inactivated bacterial/virus vaccines with conjugates forming the bulk of the balance. We have established a computational platform for modelling and optimising the flu vaccine manufacturing process to reduce costs. This generic platform will be used to create parallel models that describe existing capabilities in LMIC and other Hub partners with possible alternatives.

We will then apply whole process optimisation, system design and process intensification to improve operational flexibility and efficiency. Process intensification has great promise for cost reduction and improvement of responsiveness in vaccine manufacturing.

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Key outcomes from this workstream

  • Platform for whole plant analysis to support rapid evaluation of new technologies
  • Results of application studies demonstrating opportunities for improvements to existing vaccines