The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is set to allocate $40 million to support the accessibility of mRNA vaccines for protection against various diseases in Africa.
This funding will be directed towards a Belgian biotech company, as well as two prominent African vaccine manufacturers.
Quantoom Biosciences, based in Nivelles, will receive $20 million to advance its work on enhancing the mRNA manufacturing platform, known as Ntensify.
Simultaneously, the Institut Pasteur de Dakar in Senegal and Biovac in South Africa will each receive $5 million to acquire this technology.
An additional $10 million will be made available to other vaccine manufacturers interested in utilizing this platform.
mRNA vaccines played a pivotal role in revolutionizing the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, access to these vaccines was severely unequal.
In response, various initiatives have emerged to address this imbalance and harness this innovative technology to combat existing threats that disproportionately impact lower-income nations, such as malaria and tuberculosis.
The World Health Organization initiated its mRNA vaccine technology hub in Cape Town in April of the current year. Notably, Afrigen Biologics, a member of this hub, has already developed Africa’s first mRNA vaccine for COVID-19 in the laboratory.
Nevertheless, the production of mRNA vaccines remains costly, particularly when scaling up production to meet the demands of testing and deploying safe and effective vaccines.
Quantoom’s Ntensify platform offers a solution by enabling more cost-effective and efficient production of mRNA batches at scale, as highlighted by a Gates Foundation spokeswoman ahead of the official announcement at the 2023 Grand Challenges Annual Meeting in Dakar on Monday.
“(This) is an important and necessary step towards vaccine self-reliance in the region,” said Dr Amadou Sall, chief executive of the Institut Pasteur de Dakar.
Ntensify originally received its funding from the Gates Foundation through its parent company, Univercells, back in 2016.
Afrigen has already begun utilizing this platform, including its application in the development of vaccines for Rift Valley fever and gonorrhea. Gates and Afrigen have indicated that this platform has the potential to reduce vaccine development costs by half when compared to traditional mRNA technology.
“The second generation (of mRNA) is to reduce the cost,” said Petro Terblanche, Afrigen’s chief executive, on a phone call from Dakar on Sunday.