With Africa under immense pressure to curb an outbreak of the mpox, Aspen Pharmacare is “in talks” with partners to manufacture vaccines at its facilities, according to CEO Stephen Saad.
“We are speaking to people,” he told Reuters, without naming the companies. “We have capacity and the capability to make mpox vaccines… and we’re comfortable we can manufacture the product.”
To avoid being left with idle capacity as happened when Aspen made Covid-19 vaccines for which demand never materialised, the company has provided two preconditions, Saad said.
“The first is we need to know we have a commitment to volumes, regardless. We can’t be told we’re going to get a billion (orders) and then it becomes nothing.
“The second is, it costs money to transfer these products into a facility, so we will do it if someone pays for the tech transfer into our facility.”
Aspen’s senior executive for strategic trade development, Dr Stavros Nicolaou, said unnecessary lives and livelihoods were lost during the pandemic as Africa played second fiddle to wealthier nations in terms of vaccines.
At the 82nd International Pharmaceutical Federation Congress last week – taking place for the first time in South Africa – he said it was a situation that should not have been repeated.
“We said that, as a continent, we need to resolve that this shall never happen again. Guess what? Four years on, we’re faced with … mpox. To be frank, we haven’t really moved on much since 2020. If ever there were a time to reflect on how we get to grips with this problem, it’s now.”
Less than 1% of vaccines administered in Africa are manufactured on the continent, reports News24.
The key to achieving sustainable capacities and capabilities on the continent is “entirely dependent on sustainable demand and offtakes, procurement from African manufacturers, and a supportive regulatory pathway to ensure speed and swiftness”, Nicolaou advocated.
He presented a four-point plan, or “blueprint”, which he believed could achieve this.
First, there needed to be a reform of vaccine and pharmaceutical procurement by international agencies. This could be done by undertaking offtake agreements with African producers that ensure sustainable offtakes and build globally competitive economies of scale. (An offtake agreement is an agreement to buy or sell some of a producer’s goods that haven’t yet been made.)
“It’s a sad indictment that … agencies procure next to no vaccines from Africa. Yet Africa, for example, sits with 70% of the world’s HIV-infected (population) and has to import most of its ARVs. How could that ever make sense?”
“Africa is largely used as a consumer of medicine and not a maker,” Professor Glenda Gray, former president and CEO of the South African Medical Research Council, told conference delegates.
“We need to build local vaccine manufacturing capability. We need serious investment and support from government… We need people who can do (and) be involved in South African manufacturing."
She, too, highlighted the importance of achieving health security on the continent through sustainable domestic manufacturing capabilities.
After the “huge innovation” in vaccines after the Covid-19 outbreak, there has since been limited reach of this into Africa, Gray added.
She lamented the lack of commercial interest, saying the “global burden of HIV lives in Africa, so no one really cares as it’s poor people who get HIV – they don’t have the buying potential”.
Pooling of resources
Nicolaou called for the establishment of an African pooled procurement mechanism, similar to the African Vaccine Acquisition Task Team launched during the pandemic, which was able to procure Covid vaccines for the whole continent.
This, he said, needed to be re-established and institutionalised under the African Union or the Africa Centre for Disease Control and Prevention.
He further called for the acceleration of technology transfer arrangements ahead of time if international agencies commit to buying outbreak capacity in manufacturing plants for stockpiling purposes.
“Africa does not have its own technologies at this point. It depends on technology transfers… and it can take you 12 to 18 months to receive.”
The prioritisation and parallel submission of regulatory data for registering products was also necessary, he added, urging the FIP Industrial Pharmacy Section as well as the African Pharmaceutical Forum to “pick up the cudgels and drive this forward to its logical conclusion, which is health equity and health security for Africa”.
Reuters article – African drugmaker Aspen in talks to manufacture mpox vaccines (Open access)
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Aspen gets $30m grant to make vaccines for Africa
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$1bn plan for African vaccine manufacturing