Steve Bates OBE
Chief Executive BioIndustry Association and former member of the UK Vaccine Taskforce
Industry, academia and government collaboration was critical to the UK’s success in procuring, developing, manufacturing and scaling up COVID-19 vaccines.
This tripartite relationship began in February 2020, nearly four months prior to Dame Kate Bingham’s appointment as chair of the UK Vaccine Taskforce (VTF) and before the agreement between AstraZeneca and Oxford University.
This early work was essential to enable government to see the tremendous strength of the UK life sciences ecosystem and led to a domino effect of further collaborations and investments.
Scaling up vaccine manufacturing
After a request from Cath Green CBE, from the Oxford Clinical BioManufacturing Facility, the BIA galvanised its manufacturing community into a taskforce to assess UK supply chains and provide expertise to understand how to scale up, at pace, any successful COVID-19 vaccines developed by Oxford University and Imperial College London.
Key companies included Cobra Biologics, Oxford Biomedica, Pall Corporation, the Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult, Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies, Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) and the Vaccine Manufacturing Innovation Centre (VMIC).
They worked day and night to support efforts to scale up vaccines for clinical trials and ultimately for delivery to patients. Ian McCubbin CBE former Vaccine Manufacturing lead on the VTF said: “There is no doubt that the BIA Taskforce created the momentum to form the UK based supply chains for the Oxford University and AstraZeneca vaccine and the Imperial RNA vaccine, which accelerated the development and scale up of the AstraZeneca vaccine in particular.”
Strength of UK life sciences
This early work was essential to enable government to see the tremendous strength of the UK life sciences ecosystem and led to a domino effect of further collaborations and investments. The Government has invested in a Cell and Gene Manufacturing Innovation Centre in Braintree, CPI will be home to an mRNA vaccine library. The additional funding for VMIC will create a key UK resource for future pandemic preparedness, as will the funding for Valneva’s manufacturing site in Livingstone, Scotland.
Building on these trusted and robust collaborations will be critical as we continue to build pandemic preparedness here in the UK and around the world.
