Afrigen is the linchpin of global project to use mRNA technology to empower low-resource countries to make their own vaccines against killer diseases from TB to HIV. What will it take to succeed?
Imagine a world with vaccines not just for global threats like measles and COVID but for all the diseases that afflict people in the world's poorest countries – illnesses that are largely ignored but devastating, such as tuberculosis, dengue and lassa fever. And even for the ongoing epidemic of HIV.Gerhardt Boukes, chief scientist at Afrigen Biologics and Vaccines, formulates mRNA for use in a new vaccine against COVID-19.
Except that so far only two companies — Moderna and Pfizer-BioNtech — have succeeded in making mRNA vaccines. And they're not sharing their know-how. The lead scientist for the team in this room, Eden Padayachee, says that means developing a whole new system for production at mass scale. Weber gets on the computer to see if it's possible to buy a microscopic filter that could strain out the particles. One option looks particularly good.
And that's just one of what Terblanche says is a"battlefield's" worth of patent holders Afrigen may have to contend with.
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