SA biotech firm Afrigen makes Africa’s first mRNA vaccine

A South African biotech firm Afrigen said Thursday it has produced the first mRNA Covid vaccine made on the continent and that it will be ready for clinical trials in November.

Cape Town-based Afrigen Biologics and Vaccines is leading the pilot project, backed by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the COVAX initiative, to tweak Moderna’s shot.

“At laboratory scale we have a vaccine that we now need to test,” Afrigen’s managing director Petro Terblanche, told AFP, adding the first shot was ready during the second week of January.

Tests on animals will start next month, “but the human studies will only start around November 2022,” she said after meeting a group of officials sponsoring the project.

Afrigen researchers sequenced the publicly available genetic code that Moderna used to make their vaccine, made the DNA, the RNA and produced their own shot.

“So we have completed the process from the design to a final formulation, but it’s small scale, but it’s a good start, it’s fabulous start,” said the laboratory’s chief.

She spoke after the UN-backed global Medicines Patent Pool gave the firm a 39-million-euro ($45 million) grant.

Their mRNA vaccine can be kept at warmer temperatures, making them easier to store in low- and middle-income settings. The original jab requires expensive -25°C to -15°C refrigeration. 

Charles Gore, MPP’s executive director said in a statement that his organisation was “delighted to support Afrigen and its African partners to greatly expand local manufacturing capacity and reduce today’s gross inequity”.

The grant will cover the technology transfer hub’s work for five years, through 2026. 

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The French government funds the MPP’s activities linked to the hub.

“We will keep supporting this project… it’s a very important one for the world and for Africa,” the French ambassador to Pretoria, Aurelien Lechevallier said after touring the lab.

The MPP is an international organisation that supports development of medicines for low- and middle-income countries.

Set up in July, the tech transfer hub will train other countries and hand out production licences to poor nations left out in the race for the life-saving shots.

“Its aim is to allow for greater and more diversified vaccine manufacturing capability, strengthen African regional health security and respond more equitably” to the current and future pandemics, said a statement.

Africa is the least vaccinated continent in the world.

More than a year after the world’s first Covid shot was administered and two years into the pandemic itself, just 11.3 percent of Africans have been fully immunised. 

The problem has exposed Africa’s huge dependence on imported vaccines and its tech weakness compared with Europe, China, and the United States.

To date only one percent of the vaccines used in Africa are produced on the continent.

Other players involved in the Cape Town hub which was set up in July are Biologicals and Vaccines Institute of Southern Africa (Biovac), the South African Medical Research Council, and Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC).