The federal and Victorian governments and pharmaceutical giant Moderna have struck an in-principle agreement to manufacture mRNA vaccines in Australia.
Under the deal, announced on Tuesday, a manufacturing facility will be built in Victoria, enabling up to 100m mRNA vaccines to be produced locally each year.
The announcement comes almost a year after experts urged the government to establish a local mRNA manufacturing facility, and vaccine production is not set to begin until 2024. With vaccine production still years away, will mRNA vaccines still be useful then?
Why wasn’t Australia making its own mRNA vaccines already?
mRNA vaccines have been in development for years, but were only brought to market for the first time during the Covid-19 pandemic, with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. In 2018, the technology was described by scientists as “a new era in vaccinology” for its “capacity for rapid development and potential for low-cost manufacture”.
Australia’s biotechnology infrastructure is not as developed as some other countries in the Asia-Pacific, such as Singapore and South Korea. At present, CSL Limited is Australia’s only onshore vaccine manufacturer, and to produce approved mRNA vaccines it would have had to license the intellectual property from Pfizer or Moderna.
Though the Moderna deal is welcome news, progress has been “very slow”, said Prof Trent Munro, a biopharmaceuticals expert at the University of Queensland. “The fact that it took this long to get an agreement across the line, and the fact that it’s just an in-principle agreement … there’s probably still a lot to be hashed out.”
In May, the federal government announced an approach to market, calling on bids from firms interested in manufacturing mRNA vaccines locally. Leading Australian scientists had advocated for such a move since February, in order to reduce reliance on overseas supply and to safeguard against potential supply disruptions.
Will mRNA vaccines still be useful in 2024?
While Pfizer and Moderna have developed mRNA vaccines for Covid-19, the technology has the potential to treat a variety of illnesses. mRNA vaccines were initially tested for cancer treatment, and have also shown promise in treating autoimmune conditions.
mRNA vaccines contain synthetic sequences of messenger ribonucleic acid, a genetic blueprint our cells use to make proteins. In mRNA Covid vaccines, the sequence tells cells to produce copies of the virus’s spike protein, triggering an immune response. To treat other conditions, this sequence can be changed to encode for other proteins.
According to Moderna, the deal will result in the onshore manufacturing of a “portfolio of mRNA vaccines against respiratory viruses, including Covid-19, seasonal influenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and potential other vaccines, pending licensure”.
“In the vaccine space, what people are really hopeful about is that mRNA vaccines allow you to put multiple targets into one vial,” Munro said. “The big hope [is] that you can have a vaccine against RSV, flu, cytomegalovirus, Covid-19 all in one shot … It’s quite difficult to do that with other vaccine types.”
In a statement, the Australian Academy of Science said the mRNA vaccine manufacturing deal would “significantly grow our sovereign capability to respond to future pandemics”.
“The opportunity to take advantage of the potential to develop more advanced uses of RNA therapies and technologies in the future, including the treatment of disorders such as arthritis, cancer and malaria and producing environmentally friendly biopesticides, should be seized,” it said.
Why will it take years before mRNA vaccines are locally produced?
Locally manufacturing mRNA vaccines by 2024 is an “incredibly aggressive” time frame, Munro said. “Moderna as an organisation is under stress as it is to even manufacture products today.”
Munro said the Australian deal would be resource intensive, especially given existing manufacturing commitments the pharmaceutical giant has in countries such as Canada and South Korea.
Fitting out a facility to a produce high-quality therapeutics – a standard known as GMP – would also take time, Munro said. “Globally, there are huge pressures on supply chains for specialist equipment,” he added.
Australia could eventually become an exporter of mRNA vaccines. “The issue is, of course, that profit essentially goes back to Moderna. It doesn’t come here to Australia,” Munro said. “We’d like to see more Australian innovation come forward, and we’d like to see Moderna support Australian R&D.”
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