Dive summary:
- Sanofi will help manufacture more than 100 million doses of the coronavirus vaccine from Pfizer and BioNTech, agreeing to lend spare production capacity to partner companies after setbacks and delays in developing their own candidate vaccines.
- The additional doses will only be used to supply countries in the European Union, a company spokesman confirmed to BioPharma Dive, with initial deliveries scheduled for August. Sanofi will use a factory in Frankfurt, Germany, to fill and pack vaccine bottles from Pfizer and BioNTech.
- Pfizer and BioNTech said they could produce around 2 billion doses this year, but demand has far outstripped supply with the start of immunization campaigns in the US, UK and Europe. Earlier this month, companies briefly cut production at the Pfizer plant in Puurs, Belgium, to help boost production.
Dive Insight:
The Sanofi agreement is an unusual collaboration between companies that would normally be competitors and reflects the urgency to produce more doses of vaccine quickly.
The deal is temporary, however, with Sanofi ensuring capacity at its Frankfurt plant just this year.
“We moved activities between sites to be able to manufacture more than 100 million doses of BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine on a temporary basis,” a company spokesman said in a statement. “This is the maximum that we can produce in this period of time with the industrial capacities that we have available.”
Le Figaro, a French newspaper, first reported the news, citing an interview with Sanofi’s CEO Paul Hudson.
Time overlaps with a window that Sanofi has while its own coronavirus development work moves through the earlier stages.
Sanofi, along with partner GlaxoSmithKline, currently plans to start a major trial testing its candidate protein-based vaccine later this year. If that study is successful, the companies predict that the vaccine may be available in the fourth quarter.
This schedule represents a delay of up to six months from the initial projections by Sanofi and GSK. The results of an initial test of the vaccine were weak, forcing companies to switch to a new formulation that they believe could stimulate a stronger immune response.
Sanofi is also working with Translate Bio to develop another vaccine that uses messenger RNA, but development is at much earlier stages. Initial human testing is expected to begin this quarter.
With a handful of vaccines now available in several countries around the world, some have asked manufacturers not to be involved or even further behind in developing their own vaccine to help those who have been successful. The Sanofi agreement is the most notable example to emerge.
This week, Merck & Co. announced it would stop developing two candidate vaccines against the coronavirus it had been testing, after both performed poorly in the tests. The company told Bloomberg, however, that it will “refurbish” some of its manufacturing facilities to produce an experimental COVID-19 treatment it has recently acquired.