Vaccine development is a complex and time-consuming process. Finding a candidate that is both safe and effective in triggering an immune response can take many years.
Viruses can also mutate quickly, necessitating new treatments for each new strain.
On demonstration of safety and efficacy, producing sufficient doses for widespread distribution is a further challenge. Biotherapeutics require tightly controlled conditions for production, and it is difficult to maintain these specific conditions when scaling up from a research lab to global production, as needed for a pandemic such as a coronavirus COVID-19. There is also the added time pressure of scaling up a vaccine production as quickly as possible.
Vaccines must be produced in large batches, at a low cost per dose, to offer broad and effective protection. The link between researchers and the vaccine manufacturing process has never been so important. When time is short, process design engineers and researchers need to work together to ensure that the vaccine can be replicated reliably at scale for clinical trials and then again at an even greater scale for mass production.
As a fluid path partner to bioprocessing companies worldwide, we form a link between research and development teams, and process engineers to ensure the optimum equipment performance throughout each development stage. As development reaches production, your processing equipment, materials, and processes must be validated and deliver safe, consistent viability, and product quality. Leveraging our entire fluid path portfolio supports a reduction in additional validation steps, accelerating the progression from bench to production.