Vaccine Manufacturing: Process Development and Expertise

The process to manufacture attenuated virus-based vaccines is complex, consists of multiple steps and must maintain the infective potential of the attenuated virus.

Manufacturing of VLPs involves cell-based expression of the virus-shell protein. VLPs can be expressed in several heterologous expression systems including mammalian cell culture, baculovirus / insect cell culture system, microbial fermentation and plants.

While the manufacturing process for vaccine vectors is fairly templated, some challenges may arise, since several different viruses with varying properties can be used.

pDNA manufacturing presents several challenges. Production suffers from low productivity of microbial fermentation. Additionally, the purification process is complicated by the fact that the bacterial lysate is highly viscous and contains contaminants with properties similar to pDNA, leading to low resolution separation.

Development and manufacturing of mRNA vaccines is comparatively simple, scalable and extremely rapid. mRNA is produced by in vitro synthesis through an enzymatic process, there is no need to remove cells or host cell proteins, and it allows GMP facilities to switch to a new protein target within a very short period of time.

Protein subunit vaccines use purified, recombinant fragments of viral proteins as antigens to stimulate the immune system and create protective immunity. Because viral protein fragments are incapable of causing infection, recombinant protein-based vaccines are considered to be safer than use of live attenuated or inactivated viruses.