Italian ReiThera Srl. (Rome), German LEUKOCARE AG (Munich), and Belgian Univercells S.A. (Brussels), today announced a strategic collaboration for the development and large-scale manufacturing of a novel adenoviral vector-based vaccine against COVID-19. The vaccine candidate is expected to enter clinical trials during summer 2020 with large-scale vaccine production planned to start soon after. The partners will contribute to the program combining their individual strengths and expertise to accelerate the development of the vaccine. In support of the fight against a long-lasting pandemic outbreak, the three European biotech companies have formed a pan-European consortium to pursue this strategy and develop a single-dose vaccine.
The current coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, has imposed, in just four months, a massive global burden on humanity. To protect high-risk groups, contain the spread and manifestation of the disease as well as mitigate the burden on healthcare systems, a vaccine is urgently required to address the global need to protect people, communities and economies. Besides the challenge of developing a safe and protective vaccine, it is equally important to be able to manufacture billions of affordable vaccine doses in record time.
The pan-European consortium of ReiThera, LEUKOCARE and Univercells brings together a highly efficient and ultra-fast vaccine development group to address these challenges by combining their unique expertise in vector-based vaccine development, vaccine formulation and manufacturing, respectively.
Univercells will capitalize on the previous successes of its scale-X™ bioreactor and NevoLine™ biomanufacturing platform to adapt and scale-up the technology platform and enable the mass production of ReiThera’s vaccine candidate. Univercells will provide its highly efficient bioproduction platform for ultra-fast ramping up of GMP manufacturing of the adenoviral product. This NevoLine technology significantly reduces the infrastructure required for the production of vaccines while simplifying and automating operations.
José Castillo, Chief Technology Officer of Univercells, stated: “The world is facing a crisis never seen before and we are committed to doing our part to make a COVID-19 vaccine available and affordable as quickly as possible. We will adapt our bioproduction platform to the specific needs in record time and will ramp up manufacturing capacities at Univercells and third parties to answer this urgent need.”