(422e) Techno-Economic Analysis of Emerging Vaccine Platform and Production Technologies: How Can We Produce Vaccines Faster and Cheaper?

Conventional vaccine production technologies cannot produce vaccines against new diseases at the rates and volumes required to stop the spread of future epidemics. Additionally, infant and child vaccination demands are often unmet in developing countries due to high upfront vaccine manufacturing facility capital investment costs, inflexibility of manufacturing facilities to produce a wide range of products, and due to cold chain logistic complexities.

Emerging vaccine platform technologies together with advanced bioproduction technologies can empower the production of a wide range of vaccine types, rapidly and at large volumes. Therefore, these exciting new technologies can address both rapid outbreak-response and routine mass vaccination challenges.

However, the vaccine production processes using these new and transformative technologies are not yet established. Furthermore, the total costs of vaccines obtained using these new platform technologies and advanced bioproduction modalities are not well understood. Hence, here process simulation results and the techno-economic analyses of the following 4 new promising vaccine platform technologies is presented: (1) RNA vaccines, (2) Generalized Modules for Membrane Antigen (GMMA), (3) ADDomer vaccines, and (4) humanized yeast-produced vaccines. Additionally, the production costs of these vaccine platform technologies both in conventional and advanced bioproduction facilities are evaluated. For the advanced bioproduction scenario, intensified processes are considered, whereby the facility-related capital and operating expenses can be reduced by containing the production processes inside laminar flow isolators.

Our work indicates that emerging vaccine platform technologies coupled with advanced bioproduction facilities can enable: (a) cost-effective, small-scale manufacturing, promoting out-scalable and distributed manufacturing; (b) rapid and on-demand production; (c) thermostable vaccine products, potentially eliminating cold chain requirements; and (d) flexible production of a wide range of vaccine products using the same production line.