BioNTech will give Sanofi access to its production facilities in Frankfurt.
Photographer: Daniel Acker / Bloomberg
Photographer: Daniel Acker / Bloomberg
Sanofi has agreed to produce millions of doses of BioNTech SE and Coronavirus vaccine from Pfizer Inc. in an unusual collaboration to accelerate vaccination efforts.
The French pharmaceutical company will give BioNTech access to a production facility in Frankfurt, which will begin delivering doses this summer, Sanofi said in a press release. statement Wednesday. The deal will produce more than 125 million doses of the messenger RNA vaccine for the European Union.
Sanofi’s own efforts to develop a vaccine with another major pharmaceutical company have failed, which means it will not be ready in the summer as expected. The agreement allows the region to offset part of the losses, accelerating the complex process of packaging and distributing a vaccine that needs to be kept in an ultra-cold state. These deals may become more common as a way of increasing production.
“We had a slight delay in one of our candidate vaccines and decided to use that time to mobilize our production capabilities to help with that of Pfizer,” Olivier Bogillot, who heads Sanofi’s operations in France, said on RTL radio. It is the first time that a pharmaceutical company will work to help make a rival vaccine, he said.
Pfizer and BioNTech has been looking for ways to increase the supply of its immunization, from expanding existing plants to adding suppliers and contract manufacturers. Lonza Group AG, the Swiss company that manufactures The vaccine Moderna Inc. said on Wednesday that it is working hard to find ways to increase production and is willing to help other producers get treatments or injections.
Sanofi’s own Covid-19 vaccine candidate under development with GlaxoSmithKline Plc will enter another intermediate clinical trial in February, with the potential to hit the market in the fourth quarter, the company said. The experimental product suffered a blow in December, after a study showed it had failed to produce a strong enough response in older people, perhaps due to a formulation error.
Sanofi also plans to start the first clinical trials of its own messenger RNA candidate vaccine in February or March. Shares rose about 1% on the Paris floor.
– With the help of Riley Griffin and Albertina Torsoli
(Updates with comments from the Sanofi executive in the fourth paragraph)