Lower-income countries did not get the COVID vaccines they needed. So the World Bank and other partners tapped a South African company to cook up the (undisclosed) recipe for the Moderna mRNA vaccine.
The larger goal of the"mRNA hub" effort – as the initiative is called – is to develop the capability to produce mRNA vaccines more generally. But as a first test, Afrigen was tasked with making an mRNA vaccine against COVID that it could prove was essentially a replica of Moderna's version.
These side-by-side comparison methods include studies that show that Afrigen's version of the vaccine behaves similarly to Moderna's in mice. And, as of last May, a series of"challenge" trials were completed in which hamsters were given the vaccine and then exposed to the coronavirus to show that the Afrigen vaccine was just as effective as Moderna's in preventing infection.
"If you'd asked me 18 months ago," she says, I would have said to you, 'It's not possible.' So I'm very upbeat."As Afrigen has mastered each step, it's also created a training program to pass on that knowledge to the scientists from 15 countries currently participating in the mRNA hub effort – including Argentina, Bangladesh, Egypt, Nigeria, Serbia and Vietnam.
The visiting scientists were chemists, biochemists and bioprocessing engineers with deep experience working on vaccines, notes Terblanche."But almost none of them had ever worked on mRNA vaccines. It is a very different vaccine manufacturing platform." Afrigen has also finished putting together the next training module – an information package explaining how others can get started on making Afrigen's mRNA vaccine."The design of the facility, what equipment you will need, what raw materials, all the analytics," says Terblanche."That has been sent to most of the partners too."But the info package only covers how to make small quantities of the vaccine.
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