Oxford Biomedica signs five-year collaboration with UK's dedicated vaccines facility

Gene and cell therapy group Oxford Biomedica will work with the Vaccines Manufacturing and Innovation Centre (VMIC) to help the UK improve its standing in manufacturing viral vector-based vaccines.

The five-year agreement will see Oxford Biomedica collaborating with the VMIC to enable the manufacture of viral vector based vaccines. It’s hoped that the collaboration will contribute towards a rapid increase in the UK’s domestic capacity for this area of vaccine manufacturing.

Through the collaboration agreement, the VMIC will provide manufacturing equipment for Oxford Biomedica to rapidly equip two new manufacturing suites within Oxford Biomedica’s new commercial manufacturing centre – Oxbox – located in Oxford.

In doing so, this will provide additional manufacturing capacity and enable further scale up for the adenovirus vector based Covid-19 vaccine candidate, AZD1222 (previously known as ChAdOx1 nCoV-19). That vaccine candidate has now entered clinical trials, with AstraZeneca taking over global responsibility for the manufacture, development and distribution of the vaccine. An initial clinical and commercial supply agreement for multiple batches has also been signed between AstraZeneca and Oxford Biomedica.

The collaboration will also have Oxford Biomedica train VMIC staff to help accelerate the operational readiness and GMP manufacturing capabilities for viral vector vaccine candidates at the VMIC’s new manufacturing site at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus.

More so, the agreement also provides a framework for a longer-term partnership between the two organisations. In particular, Oxford Biomedica could provide its manufacturing capacity to help produce other viral vector vaccine candidates for the UK population when needed.

John Dawson, chief executive officer of Oxford Biomedica, said: “Since we became involved in addressing the urgent need for UK manufacturing capacity for AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine candidate AZD1222, we have strived to support VMIC’s broader goal of accelerating and supporting UK manufacturing capacity and capabilities for vaccines more generally. This highly collaborative partnership allows for a rapid deployment capability to be established, and also accelerates fit out and utilisation of another two GMP manufacturing suites within our new commercial manufacturing facility, Oxbox.”

Matthew Duchars, chief executive officer of Vaccines Manufacturing Innovation Centre, said: “This collaboration with Oxford Biomedica means that together we can significantly increase the UK’s capacity to manufacture viral vectors vaccines as part of a national effort in response to Covid-19. This marks a major milestone for VMIC in setting up collaborative partnerships with industry – this is the first collaboration agreement outside of our founding partners under VMIC’s longer term objective of boosting the UK’s vaccines manufacturing capability.”