Rentschler Biopharma to produce 100m doses of CureVac vaccine

Rentschler Biopharma SE is preparing large scale cGMP production and formulation of Curevac’s mRNA vaccine CVnCoV. Under a contract, signed in November 2020, the company aims to produce  more than 100 million doses annually of CureVac’s COVID-19 vaccine, which is currently in Phase IIb/III testing, at its Laupheim site. CureVac plans to file an MAA in Q3/2021. Additionally, German Bayer AG will produce 160 million doses of the vaccine per year at its Wuppertal manufacturing site. Rentschler Biopharma is currently in the stage of process optimisation of CVnCoV.

According to CureVac’s co-founder and chief production officer, Florian von der Muelbe, CureVac will follow a two-pronged strategy for production of its vaccine. Firstly, building a global network for large scale production of CVnCoV and secondly, using an automated RNA printer technology, co-developed with Tesla Grohmann Research to rapidly produce the vaccine in local clusters of infection. According to von der Mülbe, this technology can produce hundredthousands of doses of its RNA vaccine within two weeks. This might open up flexible production of 2nd generation vaccines that have been adapted to mutants of SARS-CoV-2.

Von der Mülbe added, "Rentschler Biopharma is known in our industry for high-quality performance. Curevac has started to build an integrated European vaccine manufacturing network with multiple service partners. With this strategy, our company expects to significantly increase CVnCoV production capacity to potentially several hundred million doses per year while managing potential supply chain risks."

Rentschler is also ramping up production capacities of BioNTech SE’s conditionally approved mRNA vaccine BNT161b2 at its site in Laupheim. "Following process transfer, which was completed in record time, vaccine production for BioNTech/Pfizer is running at full speed and is currently being expanded by more than 50%," Federico Pollano, Senior Vice President Global Business Development at Rentschler Biopharma told European Biotechnology.