Preparing pandemic vaccine capacity

Rapid scale-up to billions of doses requires collaborative, all-out efforts by innovators, their manufacturing partners, and the entire supply chain. The biopharmaceutical industry is working at unprecedented speed to develop and manufacture vaccines for the COVID-19 pandemic. Among the challenges of a pandemic is the need to scale up to billions of doses, at a larger scale than typically needed for vaccines, from raw materials all the way through to the materials for the containers for fill/finish. Collaborative efforts to make a safe and effective vaccine against the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, are underway around the world. The timeline to develop, produce, and distribute an approved vaccine is being dramatically compressed, and companies are scaling up manufacturing “at risk,” making the vaccines before they have been approved. While pharmaceutical companies are bearing some of the risk, these efforts are being extensively funded by governments as well as non-profit organizations, such as the Coalition...