Permanent Vaccine Facility Should Be On Standby For Future Pandemics, Moncef Slaoui Says
Source : 'The Pink Sheet'
Moncef Slaoui, the outgoing scientific advisor to Operation Warp Speed, says the quest to rapidly develop a COVID-19 vaccine has shown the need to have a permanent dedicated facility available to manufacture and develop vaccines for future pandemics.
Slaoui said no one has an idle manufacturing site waiting for the next pandemic. So, as with COVID-19, companies have to utilize sites being used for something else or build something from scratch. He said that takes time as companies need to hire and train people and validate the facilities.
“We could have gone faster if there were dedicated manufacturing facilities for this,” Slaoui said. There should be “a nucleus of a permanent facility to discover, develop and manufacture [vaccines]. And then if there is a crisis you can overlay that with a very strong partnership.”
“I think that would be my way forward, and not try to spend $20 billion when we are bleeding $20 billion a day,” he said. “Let’s spend $300 million when it’s okay and we don’t have a pandemic. Let’s be preventative.”
Slaoui noted that during his former tenure at GlaxoSmithKline plc, during which he headed up R&D and then served as chairman of the vaccine division, he had made a bio preparedness organization proposal to the US and others to have a have a permanent organization dedicated to discovering, developing and manufacturing small quantities of vaccine against known potential outbreak and pandemic agents. But he said it was never funded.
Regeneron has also called on the government to invest in a centralized government manufacturing facility to be ready to make biologics in response to new health emergencies and pandemics. ()
Slaoui made the remarks at the Milken Institute’s Future of Health Summit on 8 December, a week after he said he would be stepping back from Operation Warp Speed following the rollout of the vaccines. ()
The idea of additional manufacturing capacity has been picked up by the incoming Biden administration. (See sidebar.) Biden's proposal also aims to address what has become an unexcepted bottleneck in the rollout of the COVID vaccines (and therapies): not so much the supply of product, but ability to administer it to patients.
Operation Warp Speed was formed in April with the goal of developing a COVID-19 vaccine by the end of the year. Slaoui, then a member of Moderna, Inc.’s board of directors, was tapped with leading the initiative. ()
Slaoui said he initially got a call from Jim Greenwood, former president and CEO of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, who asked if he thought it would be possible to have something like the Manhattan Project to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. Greenwood then told him to expect a call from the Trump Administration.
Slaoui said when he met with members of the Administration he asked for two things: full empowerment and no political interference. “I was given a guarantee that would be the case and that was it,” he said.
In a Q&A session, Milken Institute chairman Michael Milken asked Slaoui what he had learned from Operation Warp Speed.
“We need to maintain and find a way to make permanent this partnership” between government and industry “in a way that is unencumbered by bureaucracy,” Slaoui replied. He said while there was bureaucray surrounding OWS it did not exist within the operation.
He also cited the experience of being able to make rapid decisions in OWS.
“It was really amazing. I could call Albert [Bourla, Pfizer Inc.’s CEO], literally many times when he was somewhere in Greece at five or four in the morning,” Slaoui said. “We would discuss something and Albert would call the teams in Pfizer and things were aligned and we didn’t have to go through 10,000 discussions. It was immediate. This kind of fast, informed decision-making is very important.”
By Brenda Sandburg