With multiple Covid-19 vaccines close to approval, the spotlight is on the logistics of delivering these vaccines to billions of people globally. Central to the UK’s strategy is to bring forward the opening date of the UK’s Vaccine Manufacturing and Innovation Centre. VMIC founding board member and Cytiva director of innovation Daria Donati discusses the challenges ahead.
In December, the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine for Covid-19 became the first to be approved in the UK. With several others not far behind, including the Moderna and Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines, we have reached a new stage in the fight against the virus. The focus has shifted away from vaccine development, and towards vaccine rollout, raising questions about supply chains and manufacturing.
Dari Donati, director of business development and innovation at Cytiva (formerly GE Healthcare Life Sciences), has decades of experience in vaccine manufacturing. A scientist with two PhDs in areas of infectious disease, she joined Cytiva in 2008 during the avian flu pandemic. Since then, she has been working with governments and industry to help them understand how they can scale up their vaccine manufacturing in the event of an emergency – a skill set that has proven all too useful in 2020.
She is also a founding board member of UK’s Vaccine Manufacturing and Innovation Centre (VMIC), based in Oxford, which will support manufacturing of the new vaccines. Here she discusses the road ahead and explains the future role for the VMIC.
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