France ramps up COVID-19 vaccine manufacturing - BioPharma-Reporter.com

CDMO Recipharm will start production for Moderna at its Monts facility next month; while Delpharm will manufacture the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine in Saint-Rémy-sur-Avre from April. In May, Fareva is set to follow suit for CureVac’s vaccine.

French facilities come online

In the European Union, three COVID-19 vaccines are currently authorized and being distributed across the 27 Member States. These are the vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech; Moderna and AstraZeneca.

The EU has also lined up doses from Johnson & Johnson, CureVac, Sanofi/GSK, Novavax and Valneva: with CureVac, J&J and Novavax being the most advanced of these.

Manufacturing vaccines in Europe is important to ensure supply for the Union, noted Agnès Pannier-Runacher, the minister delegate for Industry, in a French Government press conference last week. She noted, however, that this involves scaling up production of new technologies - such as mRNA vaccines.

“We are now in a phase of growing production capability, which will determine an increase in deliveries. This scaling up of production – and notably the necessary transfer of technology – is a critical and delicate stage," she said.

Increasing production is also a matter of collaboration, she noted.

"We continue to mobilise our laboratories and industries to implement new production capacity. Engaging Sanofi to produce 100 million doses of BioNTech's vaccine in 2021, as announced in January, is an example of the cooperation we have organised and wish to continue."

Uniting public and private sectors will also help produce more doses, faster, she added.

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