Catalent has received a project grant as part of a consortium looking to develop and manufacture thermo stable and cold-chain independent nano-pharmaceutical virosome-based vaccine candidates. Currently, 90% of existing vaccines are cold-chain dependent, and the goal of the consortium is to develop a scalable manufacturing process for vaccines that are stable and temperature independent.
A total project fund of €5.3 million has been awarded as part of Horizon 2020, the EU research and innovation framework program, with additional funding of as much as €3.1 million from the Swiss State Secretariat Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) for the Swiss based consortium partners. The MACIVIVA project, which stands for “Manufacturing process for Cold-chain Independent Virosome-based Vaccines” will run 3.5 years and brings together global expertise in the field of virosome vaccines, manufacturing, spray drying, freeze drying and analytical techniques from the pharma industry.
Catalent’s Swindon, UK facility, the manufacturing hub of its Zydis fast-dissolve formulation technology, will receive a portion of the total fund along with other consortium partners: Mymetics SA (Switzerland), Mymetics BV (Netherlands); Chimera Biotech Gmbh (Germany); Upperton Ltd. (UK); and Bachem AG (Switzerland).
“Catalent is pleased to be part of this consortium of cross-industry partners bringing innovative technologies together to address a serious global issue in the over-reliance on the cold chain with existing vaccines,”said Barry Littlejohns, Catalent’s president of Advanced Delivery Technologies. “Zydis is the world’s best-in-class, orally disintegrating tablet technology, and we believe our experience and expertise in this area can add substantially to the project as a whole. Because of the supply chain constraints, large populations are denied access to vaccines, so we, as a group, recognize the importance and potential of this work for global vaccine development.”
