Marburg, Germany:
Decontamination chambers, tight-fitting protective suits, a controlled atmosphere: vigilance is the order of the day when producing Covid-19 vaccines at the new BioNTech plant in Marburg, Germany.
From the outdoors, the facility is an unassuming creating on the outskirts of the town north of Frankfurt in central Germany.
But that speedily adjustments when you step inside the rooms of the second European web-site to manufacture the vaccine created by BioNTech with US giant Pfizer.
Production has been operating evening and day due to the fact the European Medicines Agency (EMA) authorized the web-site final week, with the facility poised to sooner or later churn out one billion doses a year.
“It takes a lot of manual work and about 50,000 steps to make a batch” of messenger RNA (mRNA), the substance that trains the immune method to safeguard itself against Covid-19, production manager Valeska Schilling told AFP.
From that batch, “we can make some seven or eight million doses of vaccine,” stated Schilling, who is “extremely proud” of the substantial scientific work.
‘Extremely proud’
Glass pipette in hand and wrapped head to toe in a blue protective suit, a young employee mixes pharmaceutical components in a sterile bag to start the course of action of producing mRNA.
This step, known as in-vitro transcription, is “the most technologically complicated”, Schilling notes — significantly less a mass production course of action than an art kind.
During in-vitro transcription, which Schilling compares to “making a photocopy of a book”, enzymes are used to produce up to 500 “copy” mRNA molecules from a single DNA molecule.
After the reaction to make the RNA, the resulting liquid ought to be purified: the enzymes and DNA utilised for the transcription are removed, and filtration prevents feasible contamination.
In the third and final stage of production in Marburg, the mRNA is wrapped in fatty molecules, or lipids, so that it can get inside of human cells.
In all, it requires 5 to six days to make a 35-litre batch of mRNA, which is then transported to other factories for bottling — at present performed in Belgium and quickly close to Frankfurt.
Several time-consuming tests are carried out along the way to make certain the high-quality of the vaccine, which is about 95 % productive against Covid-19 according to clinical research.
2.5 billion doses
The very first doses created by 400 workers in Marburg should really be readily available by early April, according to BioNTech, which on Tuesday announced plans to make up to 2.5 billion doses of the vaccine worldwide this year — 25 % more than initially planned.
BioNTech/Pfizer and US pharmaceutical giant Moderna had been the very first in the planet to market place vaccines employing the pioneering messenger RNA course of action.
For Marburg, hosting the BioNTech plant is component of a extended history of healthcare innovation that started in 1890 when Emil von Behring invented the diphtheria vaccine — a feat that later won him the very first Nobel prize in medicine.
The Marburg plant formerly owned by Swiss pharmaceutical group Novartis and acquired by BioNTech in late 2020 is situated in an industrial park named the “Behringwerke” immediately after the eminent scientist.
The couple behind BioNTech, Ozlem Tureci and Ugur Sahin, managed to orchestrate a quite speedy redevelopment of the plant: “It’s fantastic what we’ve achieved in such a short time,” Schilling stated.
Marburg also has a higher-safety laboratory for the study of hugely infectious and harmful viruses — one of only two in Germany.
But the town has also currently seasoned the terror of an epidemic: in 1967, it was hit by a then unknown Ebola-like illness now identified as the “Marburg virus”.
The illness nonetheless causes sporadic outbreaks in many African nations, with no vaccine in sight.
()