Adar Poonawalla, chief executive officer of Serum Institute of India
Covax, which ships Covid-19 vaccines to low- and middle-income nations, is calling for more Indian-made doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine, Reuters reported, as a key manufacturer plans to halve the vaccine’s production temporarily until it gets more orders.
The Serum Institute of India said uptake has slowed sharply and told an Indian television station that Covax was taking in fewer doses than offered. CEO Adar Poonawalla said uptake is expected to kick up next quarter, but a spokesperson for Gavi, which is providing low-cost shots worldwide as part of a collaboration with Covax, told Reuters the organization is still receiving ‘robust demand’ for Covishield.
‘Covax’s goal is to protect populations as quickly as possible but every care must be taken to ensure recipient countries are able to deploy the doses we send them,’ the spokesperson said.
Vaccine supply is just starting to increase in Africa, where the fully-vaccinated percentage of its population has bumped up to 7.5% of its 1 billion people. Around 1 million unused doses in Nigeria that were supplied from Covax are expected to have expired last month. The SII signed on to give Covax up to 550 million doses of Covishield, but so far has given just 37 million.
The head of Africa’s CDC said Thursday that SII let Africa down when it removed itself from conversations surrounding the supply of Covid-19 vaccines, Reuters said.
John Nkengasong said that at one point, he believed a deal was close, before the vaccine maker ended them, calling the behavior ‘unprofessional.’ This caused trouble when India enacted a ban on vaccine exports, as it dealt with the most vicious surge of the virus in the world. He denied the claims from SII that uptake has been slow because of vaccine hesitancy and low demand from Africa.
‘If now Serum is shipping vaccines to Covax, I don’t know the mechanics of what volumes they are shipping to Covax, but it will not surprise me that countries are now looking at that (thinking) ‘OK, we needed you and you were not there for us’,’ Nkengasong said.
European manufacturers to make more vaccines than needed domestically, officials say
As 70% of the European population has been vaccinated, EU officials are expecting vaccine plants to produce another 3.6 billion doses in 2022.
The officials said in a press briefing that the EU will have far more doses than needed, though it did not give a breakdown by vaccine makers, Reuters reported. The uptick could be vital to following through with proper donations to Covax, and countries in need that are outside of the EU.
‘We are going to produce in Europe much more than what is needed,’ the EU official said.
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Bobby Sheng, Bora Pharmaceuticals CEO
Taipei’s Bora Pharmaceuticals has linked up with Taishin Healthcare to invest about $108 million into CDMOs and CROs in response to a booming business environment for both industries.
The two companies plan to enter the macromolecular, and cell and gene therapy manufacturing spaces, and strengthen competitiveness while bolstering Taiwan’s CDMO market. According to a report from Hartford, CT-based research group Global Information, the global CDMO market was valued at $160.1 billion in 2020 and could grow to as much as $242.64 billion by 2026. There are five CDMOs in the world that have revenue above $500 million, while 75% of the field takes in less than $50 million in revenue, the report says.
Just after Merck announced a deal to partner with a manufacturer to make its experimental Covid-19 pill molnupiravir in the US, the drugmaker has reached a similar partnership to make the pill for distribution throughout the rest of the world as well.
Merck will partner with Thermo Fisher Scientific to manufacture the pill for Canada, the UK, several markets in the EU and Asia, as well as Latin America. The Whitby, Ontario site will be one of three in the world making the pill, which was developed with Ridgeback Biotherapeutics.
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KEY POINTS
Patients prefer oral dosing, but swallowing tablets can be a challenge for many patients. The Zydis® orally disintegrating tablet (ODT) platform addresses challenges associated with oral dosing, expanding benefits for patients and options for healthcare providers. A strong growth trajectory is expected for ODTs given therapeutic innovation and continued technology development.
Many patients prefer conventional tablets for the administration of medications, but some geriatric and pediatric patients and those with altered mental status and physical impairments find swallowing tablets to be difficult. Orally disintegrating tablets (ODTs), which dissolve completely without chewing or sucking, offer a patient-friendly dosage form for the administration of small-molecule drugs, peptides and proteins. With the potential for multiple sites of drug absorption, often faster onset action for the active pharmaceutical ingredient (API), and potentially greater bioavailability, ODTs are an attractive option for drug developers considering first-to-market formulations or product line extensions of existing drugs with compatible API. In this report, we look at how innovation in the industry-leading Zydis ODT platform is expanding oral formulation options and bringing benefits to patients.
Please signup to continue — it’s fast and free. This article is sponsored by Catalent and produced by Endpoints Studio. Members of the public disembark a train at King Cross Station in London, on the day that extra measures are put in place to fight the spread of the Omicron variant of Covid-19. Since Nov. 30, it’s been mandatory for people in England to wear face coverings in shops and on public transport. (Ben Cawthra/Sipa USA/Sipa via AP Images)
Like hundreds of other virologists and epidemiologists, Benjamin tenOever’s Thanksgiving weekend was interrupted with emails about an emergency Omicron meeting.
But when he logged onto a WHO conference call 9 a.m. Monday morning, officials had a surprisingly upbeat spin on the little-understood variant that had already prompted leaders around the world, fearful the strain could evade vaccines, to close their borders to broad swaths of Southern Africa.
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Each year, we aim to highlight 20 extraordinary women who are leaving their mark on drug R&D — and this year’s group was no exception.
Our list, while by no means exhaustive, includes scientists, CEOs, researchers and professors who are supercharging the discovery and development of new therapies worldwide. Our team of writers spent time with each honoree (with a few exceptions), learning their stories and sketching profiles, which you’ll find in our special report.
For the second time, we brought the celebration to a live virtual audience, featuring an award presentation followed by a panel on what it takes to break the glass ceiling in biopharma with Kojin Therapeutics CEO Luba Greenwood, AskBio CEO Sheila Mikhail, and Silverback Therapeutics CEO Laura Shawver. Our panelists had a lively discussion on how the industry’s culture has changed, how to handle sexual harassment, the progress we’ve made and the challenges that still hold women back today.
We applaud each of our honorees for scaling the heights of biopharma R&D. You got to meet most of them via brief recordings we played during our live event. Below, you’ll find bonus videos offering a longer glimpse into those interviews. And if you didn’t get a chance to tune in to our main event live, you can replay the entire show.
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Even though many biopharma leaders have come together in recent years to address its gender gap, the consensus is clear: We still have a long way to go.
Companies this year were 2.5 times more likely than last year to have a diversity and inclusion program in place, according to a recent BIO survey, but women are still largely absent from executive roles. Getting women to enter the industry isn’t the problem — studies show that they represent just under half of all biotech employees around the world. But climbing through the ranks can be challenging, as women still report facing stereotypes, and, unfortunately, harassment.
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Uğur Şahin, BioNTech CEO (Frank Rumpenhorst/dpa via AP Images)
Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech are now racing to develop Omicron-specific boosters, hoping to be ready if the new immune-evasive variant becomes dominant globally. But it wasn’t always clear that variant boosters could even work.
After the first Covid-19 vaccines were authorized and talk began of variants and next-generation vaccines, several vaccinologists raised concerns in the media and the scientific press about a potentially deleterious phenomenon that sounds as if it were born out of the Vatican’s immunology wing: Original antigenic sin.
The FDA authorized AstraZeneca’s long-acting monoclonal antibody cocktail to prevent Covid-19 in patients who are immunocomprised, providing the first level of additional protection for people who may not be adequately protected by vaccines.
Although it will only be for a small subset of the population, the EUA marks another pandemic milestone. Many people with conditions or on treatments that severely weaken their immune systems, such as cancer or multiple sclerosis, have found themselves left behind as much of the the country reopened last year.
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After spending the last 18 months working on identifying a lead cancer drug, biotech startup Totus Medicines has now raised $40 million in a Series A round to get the therapy headed to the clinic.
The biotech isn’t holding anything back in its release, touting its ‘revolutionary’ platform approach and prospects in a highly competitive field. Their original target is PI3Kα.
CEO Neil Dhawan says:
https://endpts.com/covid-19-manufacturing-roundup-covax-indian-manufacturer-at-odds-over-vaccine-supply-eu-planning-surplus-on-shot-production/
