The new Fiocruz-Bio-Manguinhos vaccine production lab
Lemann Foundation
On Valentine’s Day, scientists in Brazil produced a special gift: the first Covid-19 vaccine doses produced fully within the country. These used active pharmaceutical ingredients from Brazil, drew on a technology-transfer agreement with AstraZeneca, and were produced in a new vaccine production facility run by the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) and the Immunobiological Technology Institute (Instituto de Tecnologia em Imunobiológicos, or Bio-Manguinhos).
The new lab expects to produce 120 million Covid-19 doses by the middle of 2022. This would allow for one dose each for over half of Brazil’s population. Brazil already has high rates of vaccination against Covid-19 (with virtually universal vaccination in São Paulo), but booster shot coverage is low.
Overall, Brazil has emerged as a regional leader in vaccine production. Bio-Manguinhos is also one of the two institutes in Latin America producing mRNA vaccines under a technology-transfer agreement with the World Health Organization and partners.
Many hands contributed to the establishment of the new lab making the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. A public-private partnership, Unidos Contra a Covid, raised 106 million reais ($19 million) for its creation. The facility is now entirely publicly funded.
One of these partners was the Lemann Foundation, an education-focused charity. It may be surprising that a foundation devoted to educational opportunity would turn its attention to vaccines, but the new lab has a precedent. The organization also partnered to fund early Covid-19 vaccine trials.
Denis Mizne, CEO of the Lemann Foundation, explains the rationale. “It’s true that working with vaccines was way out of our mandate…But we had this commitment over the past 20 years to support Brazilians and people who are really tackling our biggest social issues. And it was clear in the beginning of 2020, that the biggest social issue that we’re going to face in Brazil and all over the world was the pandemic.”
The word “self-sufficiency” comes up often in discussions of expanding global access to vaccines, and Mizne invokes it when explaining the importance of having a domestic production facility for Covid-19 and related vaccines. “Brazil was becoming out of the picture, in terms of access to vaccines. We’re still seeing this innate, enormous inequality, that we discussed about self-sufficiency in terms of production. And we saw here another opportunity to support Brazil,” in the form of the new lab.
Self-sufficiency relates not only to local technological capacity, but also to sourcing of components. Until recently, Brazilian scientists were producing Covid-19 vaccines using imported ingredients.
“We never did have the capacity to produce the active ingredient. And this is what separates things,” says Mizne. It’s particularly important at a time when the pandemic has disrupted global supply chains.
The new facility got off the ground relatively quickly, though with intense media scrutiny and delays against the original schedule. According to Mizne, “We did in seven months what was supposed to take two years.” While the infrastructure was ready ahead of schedule, the time-consuming part was negotiating contracts.
He’s not overly concerned about political volatility and anti-science sentiment disrupting the vaccine center’s operations. Brazil’s anti-vaxx movement is relatively small given the country’s size, and “it’s kind of this crazy world where only the president is this big voice against vaccines,” Mizne believes. He hopes that partnering with a long-established research organization, in a non-partisan manner, will bolster the longevity of the new scientific unit.
“Building infrastructure is what builds legacy,” Mizne reflects. Given the need for many vaccines in Brazil, such as a dengue vaccine in development, he hopes that one of the facility’s legacies will be the ability to adapt to future public health challenges. Self-sufficiency is a perpetually moving target.
