The mRNA vaccine technology centre, which the World Health Organisation (WHO) built during the COVID-19 pandemic to assist poorer countries struggle to get life-saving drugs, has now been formally launched in Cape Town.
The WHO chose the South African biotech company Afrigen Biologics for a pilot project in 2021 to provide knowledge and licences for the production of COVID vaccines in low- and middle-income nations. Cyril Ramaphosa, the president of South Africa, described it as a historic milestone at the time.
In order to create its own version of the shot, AfriVac 2121, at the lab scale, Afrigen Biologics used the publicly available sequencing of Moderna Inc’s mRNA COVID vaccination and is currently scaling up manufacturing.
The vaccine candidate is the first to be created based on a widely used vaccination without the cooperation and consent of the developer; it still has to be tested on humans. Additionally, it is the first lab-scale mRNA vaccine created, developed, and produced on the African continent.
“I am … here in Cape Town with our partners to support a sustainable model for mRNA technology transfer to give low- and middle-income countries equitable access to vaccines and other lifesaving health products,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement on Thursday, the day the vaccine hub was launched.
After major pharmaceutical companies, like Moderna and Pfizer, declined to give the hub the technological know-how to replicate their vaccines, primarily due to worries about intellectual property, the hub made the decision to develop the vaccine on its own.
Discussions about the program’s sustainability, the science behind mRNA technologies, and their potential application to fight other diseases like HIV and tuberculosis that disproportionately afflict poorer countries will take place during Tedros’ five-day tour with senior health officials.
According to the WHO, as of March, 70% of the world’s population had gotten at least one dose of a COVID vaccination, although in low-income countries, that percentage was still lower than 30%.