The Pop-Up Vaccine Factories

happened in virus news today. President Joe Biden announced that the US will pay one point nine five billion dollars for an additional one hundred million doses of the Fightser COVID nineteen vaccine. The amount is consistent with agreements made for the prior two hundred million doses bought by the government. That's according to a statement from Fiser. Today. Biden said the government was also acquiring one hundred million doses of the vaccine made by Moderna. The UK government said it

is confident the country's coronavirus epidemic is shrinking. The reproduction rate of the disease. That's the average number of people a COVID nineteen infected person transmits it to drop to levels last scene. In July, new data from the Office for National Statistics also showed coronavirus infections fell for a fourth week, with around one in eighty people in England having the disease versus one in sixty five people the previous week. Finally, a new study shows that blood thinning

drugs reduce the risk of death from COVID nineteen. It's one more promising tool as physic asians scour their medicine cabinets for treatments to fight the pandemic. About fourteen percent of patients who were given the anticoagulant heperin within twenty four hours of hospital admission died from the coronavirus, compared with of those who weren't given the anti coagulant. That's according to a study published today in the British Medical Journal.

The study is based on observation, which means the results

need to be confirmed by clinical trials. And now for today's main story on the outskirts of Merburg, a small college town in Germany, coronavirus vaccine manufacturer bio n Tech has spent five frantic months renovating one of its factories to produce m r N a demand for the vaccine has been so massive that the Fieser Bio and Tech Partnership can't meet it with its existing facilities, hence the race to retrofit factories that weren't initially designed to support

the vaccine. Berlin based reporter Naomi Kreski reports that success would mean being able to vaccinate about three d and seventy five million more people per year and help bring the pandemic under control. That worrying sound is coming from a machine called a bioreactor, used in the early stages of making an MR and a vaccine. This particular bioreactor is installed in a clean room in Marburg, Germany. It's early February and three BioNTech workers in hazmat suits are

huddled at a lab bench to oversee the process. Sirc Pudding, BioNTech's chief find ential Officer and head of operations, says this bioreactor is completing just the first step in making the vaccine. There are four steps basically to make a vaccine, four to five steps. So basically the first thing what you have to do is you take a blueprint off the data that you want to imprint onto the m R and A. So this is called the DNA plasmid.

The plasmid DNA conventional shots introduce a dead or weakened virus into the body, but the BioNTech vaccine uses m RNA. These shots tell the body how to produce a harmless copy of a key portion of the virus. It essentially turns the body into its own vaccine factory. In the bioreactor, the chain of chemical reactions silently unfolds inside a giant plastic bag outside the clean room, but close enough to help quickly if needed. About fifty other bio tech employees,

from quality control to engineering, monitor the process. They're ready to jump in in case something goes wrong. This is the moment of truth for the company's new factory. It's conducting a test run that is required by the European Medicines Agency or EMAIL. We start with the drug substance and then if this works out, we'll do the drug product and then by end of the month we have all the results basically, and then we send them off to the EMAIL and they can look at it and

verify it. So basically, by end of March, if the data is fine, the email gives us the improving We can use these test batches to actually put them into the market. The factory is scaling up at a time when politicians are leaning hard on vaccine makers to produce more shots. If it works, it will let them make enough shots to successfully vaccinate three and seventy five million more people a year. But getting to this moment has

not been so simple. Pulling together a production plant to make a new vaccine and a relatively short amount of time is a massive logistical challenge. Stick started thinking about this plan in April, while BioNTech and Visor's researchers were still developing the shot. He started by expanding the existing production line at BioNTech's headquarters in Mines, Germany, but he says that wasn't enough. Then over the summer he found a potential solution, an old vaccine factory that Swiss drugs

giant no Vardes was interested in selling. We scouted the facility and looked around. Maybe there's some equipment already that's usable, For example, bioreactors. You can use birectors to produce antibodies, but you can also produce biorectors for MR and a production so lo and behold, they actually did have two of the biorectors that we needed, so we didn't have to buy this anymore. Novartis had used the site to make vaccines for swine flu, tetanus, and rabies, then retro

fitted it to make complex biological medicines. It came with three hundred trained workers. Sik knew it would need to be retrofitted again, but that would be far easier than starting from scratch. The German government gave BioNTech a roughly four hundred and fifty million dollar grant to help scale up. In September, the company announced the purchase by November, when a huge clinical trial showed that the Vaccine Works six team was already knocking down walls, changing the heating and

ventilation system at the plant. He says, there are a lot of regulatory boxes to tick when you renovate a drug factory. They look at your way house, They look at your processes, how you put stuff into the way house. They look at the stuff. If you have quarantine material, can you access it easily or is it really under quarantine and and safe with the system. Is the computer system up and running? How did you validate the computer system?

But also as simple things like the paint of the wall okay or is there a chip, paint and stuff like that. So look at all the stuff they look at your documentation. That brings us back to the process of making the m r and A. After Circing, his team finished the first step producing the m rn A, he says, you need to filter out any dirt and create a very clean product. The next step requires a high pressure pump used to mix the MR and A with fatty lipids. This is another challenge for any company

that wants to build an MR and A facility. These pumps can take up to six months to obtain because they're only made to order. So after you have this clean MR and A you encapsulated, you basically take these so called lipids, which are like um oily droplets, and you package the RNA and those That's what how you do this with a pump under high pressure, under certain temperature, with a certain velocity. BioNTech also had to figure out how to obtain the lipids at all during a pandemic.

They were never used much before the advent of m r and A vaccines, but they're crucial. They ensure the m RNA doesn't break down in the body. Syru ordered as much as he could have them last March, about the time that BioNTech and Fiser signed their development deal. All those months of work came to a head on February nine, when the team made its first test batch of m R and A. Although the vaccine technology is new, the actual production is simpler than for some older technologies.

That's because there's no need to cultivate or feed living cells. It boils down to please at the plasmid, now, please at the buffer, now stirred for X minutes at x degrees and then a low of the temperature and at some enzymes and stuff like. It's really it's really cooking. Actually, it took like twenty years to optimize the recipe and find the ingredients and optimize the ingredients, but eventually it's really cooking up. Scaling up the production of an m

R and A vaccine still takes some finesse. Though. If you cook at home and you cook something with I don't know, ten million or a hundred million liters or so for a sauce or so, and if you then want to make like ten times the sauce for it's called Thanksgiving or something, it might not work because then everything is a little bit different. So the consistency is different, and the way you have to put in your ingredients

is a little bit different. This initial badge should produce enough MR and a material to make about eight million doses of vaccine. If the process succeeds, BioNTech should be able to stockpile the test batches and ship them to customers by April. But if something goes wrong, they'll have to try again. Sis says, this could be something as small as a contamination caused by a puncture and a sterile glove wrapper. It's not a slam dunk that this works.

That's why you prepare everything with ten ten sets of ice actually and planet meticulously that that it works for the first time. It's a key week. Yes, it's a key week. Yes so far. By On text says everything has gone well. If everything continues like this, the factory is on track to be able to make up to two and fifty million doses of the vaccine in the first half of this year. And that was Naomi Kraski

And that's it for our show to Day. For coverage of the outbreak from one and twenty bureaus around the world, visit Bloomberg dot com slash coronavirus and if you like the show, please leave us a review and a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the best way to help more listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily edition is produced by Top for foreheads Magnus and Rickson and me Laura Carlson. Today's main story was reported by

Naomi Kresky. Original music by Leo Sidrin. Our editors are Rick Shine and Francesco Levi. Francesco Levi is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks for listening.