As foreign pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer Inc. and Moderna, Inc. have drawn attention for their development of vaccines, Japanese companies -- including a soy sauce manufacturer -- are helping to provide vital raw materials.
Yamasa Corp. is a soy sauce company founded in 1645 and based in Choshi, Chiba Prefecture. It supplies a raw material called pseudouridine, which is indispensable for messenger RNA (mRNA), an important genetic material used in the COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna.
Pseudouridine was the key to the speedy development of coronavirus vaccines. Messenger RNA had been considered difficult to use in vaccines because its introduction into the body causes inflammation due to the reaction of the immune system.
However, Hungarian researcher Katalin Kariko and a colleague showed that by replacing uridine, one of the components of mRNA, with pseudouridine, mRNA can be easily retained in the body and not identified as a foreign substance by the immune system.
Yamasa has been making soy sauce for nearly 400 years, and entered the pharmaceutical field in the 1970s by drawing on its research into making umami ingredients. The company said it has been exporting pseudouridine overseas since the 1980s.
In the past, Yamasa's shipments were mainly for research purposes and were small in volume, but the pandemic changed that. The company's sales of pseudouridine have surged to tens of times more than before the pandemic.
Although pharmaceutical-related business accounted for only about 10% of Yamasa's 58.1 billion yen in sales for the fiscal year ending December 2020, Managing Director Toshitada Noguchi said, "In the future, we want to grow pharmaceutical products into a pillar of our earnings on par with our mainstay soy sauce."
A wide range of Japanese companies are supporting vaccine production.
Major glass manufacturer AGC Inc. is contracted to produce plasmid DNA, a raw material for Pfizer's vaccine, at its plant in Germany. Plasmid DNA acts as a mold of sorts for transcribing genetic information into mRNA. In response to increasing demand, the company plans to expand its production line.
Fujifilm Corp. has signed a contract to manufacture vaccines being developed by Tokyo-based biotechnology startup VLP Therapeutics Japan LLC. Special equipment owned by chemical manufacturer Daicel Corp. is being used in the production of DNA vaccines for COVID-19, which are being jointly developed by medical startup AnGes Inc. and Osaka University.
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