Speaker 1: Welcome to Prognosis. I'm Laura Carlson. It's day three hundred
Speaker 1: and thirty five since coronavirus was declared a global pandemic.
Speaker 1: Today's main story. Demand for the Fightser bio n tech
Speaker 1: vaccine has outstripped the partnership's ability to produce it fast enough,
Speaker 1: so they're turning to creative solutions like retrofitting factories that
Speaker 1: were designed to do other things. But first, here's what
Speaker 1: happened in virus news today. President Joe Biden announced that
Speaker 1: the US will pay one point nine five billion dollars
Speaker 1: for an additional one hundred million doses of the Fightser
Speaker 1: COVID nineteen vaccine. The amount is consistent with agreements made
Speaker 1: for the prior two hundred million doses bought by the government.
Speaker 1: That's according to a statement from Fiser. Today. Biden said
Speaker 1: the government was also acquiring one hundred million doses of
Speaker 1: the vaccine made by Moderna. The UK government said it
Speaker 1: is confident the country's coronavirus epidemic is shrinking. The reproduction
Speaker 1: rate of the disease. That's the average number of people
Speaker 1: a COVID nineteen infected person transmits it to drop to
Speaker 1: levels last scene. In July, new data from the Office
Speaker 1: for National Statistics also showed coronavirus infections fell for a
Speaker 1: fourth week, with around one in eighty people in England
Speaker 1: having the disease versus one in sixty five people the
Speaker 1: previous week. Finally, a new study shows that blood thinning
Speaker 1: drugs reduce the risk of death from COVID nineteen. It's
Speaker 1: one more promising tool as physic asians scour their medicine
Speaker 1: cabinets for treatments to fight the pandemic. About fourteen percent
Speaker 1: of patients who were given the anticoagulant heperin within twenty
Speaker 1: four hours of hospital admission died from the coronavirus, compared
Speaker 1: with of those who weren't given the anti coagulant. That's
Speaker 1: according to a study published today in the British Medical Journal.
Speaker 1: The study is based on observation, which means the results
Speaker 1: need to be confirmed by clinical trials. And now for
Speaker 1: today's main story on the outskirts of Merburg, a small
Speaker 1: college town in Germany, coronavirus vaccine manufacturer bio n Tech
Speaker 1: has spent five frantic months renovating one of its factories
Speaker 1: to produce m r N a demand for the vaccine
Speaker 1: has been so massive that the Fieser Bio and Tech
Speaker 1: Partnership can't meet it with its existing facilities, hence the
Speaker 1: race to retrofit factories that weren't initially designed to support
Speaker 1: the vaccine. Berlin based reporter Naomi Kreski reports that success
Speaker 1: would mean being able to vaccinate about three d and
Speaker 1: seventy five million more people per year and help bring
Speaker 1: the pandemic under control. That worrying sound is coming from
Speaker 1: a machine called a bioreactor, used in the early stages
Speaker 1: of making an MR and a vaccine. This particular bioreactor
Speaker 1: is installed in a clean room in Marburg, Germany. It's
Speaker 1: early February and three BioNTech workers in hazmat suits are
Speaker 1: huddled at a lab bench to oversee the process. Sirc Pudding,
Speaker 1: BioNTech's chief find ential Officer and head of operations, says
Speaker 1: this bioreactor is completing just the first step in making
Speaker 1: the vaccine. There are four steps basically to make a vaccine,
Speaker 1: four to five steps. So basically the first thing what
Speaker 1: you have to do is you take a blueprint off
Speaker 1: the data that you want to imprint onto the m
Speaker 1: R and A. So this is called the DNA plasmid.
Speaker 1: The plasmid DNA conventional shots introduce a dead or weakened
Speaker 1: virus into the body, but the BioNTech vaccine uses m RNA.
Speaker 1: These shots tell the body how to produce a harmless
Speaker 1: copy of a key portion of the virus. It essentially
Speaker 1: turns the body into its own vaccine factory. In the bioreactor,
Speaker 1: the chain of chemical reactions silently unfolds inside a giant
Speaker 1: plastic bag outside the clean room, but close enough to
Speaker 1: help quickly if needed. About fifty other bio tech employees,
Speaker 1: from quality control to engineering, monitor the process. They're ready
Speaker 1: to jump in in case something goes wrong. This is
Speaker 1: the moment of truth for the company's new factory. It's
Speaker 1: conducting a test run that is required by the European
Speaker 1: Medicines Agency or EMAIL. We start with the drug substance
Speaker 1: and then if this works out, we'll do the drug
Speaker 1: product and then by end of the month we have
Speaker 1: all the results basically, and then we send them off
Speaker 1: to the EMAIL and they can look at it and
Speaker 1: verify it. So basically, by end of March, if the
Speaker 1: data is fine, the email gives us the improving We
Speaker 1: can use these test batches to actually put them into
Speaker 1: the market. The factory is scaling up at a time
Speaker 1: when politicians are leaning hard on vaccine makers to produce
Speaker 1: more shots. If it works, it will let them make
Speaker 1: enough shots to successfully vaccinate three and seventy five million
Speaker 1: more people a year. But getting to this moment has
Speaker 1: not been so simple. Pulling together a production plant to
Speaker 1: make a new vaccine and a relatively short amount of
Speaker 1: time is a massive logistical challenge. Stick started thinking about
Speaker 1: this plan in April, while BioNTech and Visor's researchers were
Speaker 1: still developing the shot. He started by expanding the existing
Speaker 1: production line at BioNTech's headquarters in Mines, Germany, but he
Speaker 1: says that wasn't enough. Then over the summer he found
Speaker 1: a potential solution, an old vaccine factory that Swiss drugs
Speaker 1: giant no Vardes was interested in selling. We scouted the
Speaker 1: facility and looked around. Maybe there's some equipment already that's usable,
Speaker 1: For example, bioreactors. You can use birectors to produce antibodies,
Speaker 1: but you can also produce biorectors for MR and a
Speaker 1: production so lo and behold, they actually did have two
Speaker 1: of the biorectors that we needed, so we didn't have
Speaker 1: to buy this anymore. Novartis had used the site to
Speaker 1: make vaccines for swine flu, tetanus, and rabies, then retro
Speaker 1: fitted it to make complex biological medicines. It came with
Speaker 1: three hundred trained workers. Sik knew it would need to
Speaker 1: be retrofitted again, but that would be far easier than
Speaker 1: starting from scratch. The German government gave BioNTech a roughly
Speaker 1: four hundred and fifty million dollar grant to help scale up.
Speaker 1: In September, the company announced the purchase by November, when
Speaker 1: a huge clinical trial showed that the Vaccine Works six
Speaker 1: team was already knocking down walls, changing the heating and
Speaker 1: ventilation system at the plant. He says, there are a
Speaker 1: lot of regulatory boxes to tick when you renovate a
Speaker 1: drug factory. They look at your way house, They look
Speaker 1: at your processes, how you put stuff into the way house.
Speaker 1: They look at the stuff. If you have quarantine material,
Speaker 1: can you access it easily or is it really under
Speaker 1: quarantine and and safe with the system. Is the computer
Speaker 1: system up and running? How did you validate the computer system?
Speaker 1: But also as simple things like the paint of the
Speaker 1: wall okay or is there a chip, paint and stuff
Speaker 1: like that. So look at all the stuff they look
Speaker 1: at your documentation. That brings us back to the process
Speaker 1: of making the m r and A. After Circing, his
Speaker 1: team finished the first step producing the m rn A,
Speaker 1: he says, you need to filter out any dirt and
Speaker 1: create a very clean product. The next step requires a
Speaker 1: high pressure pump used to mix the MR and A
Speaker 1: with fatty lipids. This is another challenge for any company
Speaker 1: that wants to build an MR and A facility. These
Speaker 1: pumps can take up to six months to obtain because
Speaker 1: they're only made to order. So after you have this
Speaker 1: clean MR and A you encapsulated, you basically take these
Speaker 1: so called lipids, which are like um oily droplets, and
Speaker 1: you package the RNA and those That's what how you
Speaker 1: do this with a pump under high pressure, under certain temperature,
Speaker 1: with a certain velocity. BioNTech also had to figure out
Speaker 1: how to obtain the lipids at all during a pandemic.
Speaker 1: They were never used much before the advent of m
Speaker 1: r and A vaccines, but they're crucial. They ensure the
Speaker 1: m RNA doesn't break down in the body. Syru ordered
Speaker 1: as much as he could have them last March, about
Speaker 1: the time that BioNTech and Fiser signed their development deal.
Speaker 1: All those months of work came to a head on
Speaker 1: February nine, when the team made its first test batch
Speaker 1: of m R and A. Although the vaccine technology is new,
Speaker 1: the actual production is simpler than for some older technologies.
Speaker 1: That's because there's no need to cultivate or feed living cells.
Speaker 1: It boils down to please at the plasmid, now, please
Speaker 1: at the buffer, now stirred for X minutes at x
Speaker 1: degrees and then a low of the temperature and at
Speaker 1: some enzymes and stuff like. It's really it's really cooking. Actually,
Speaker 1: it took like twenty years to optimize the recipe and
Speaker 1: find the ingredients and optimize the ingredients, but eventually it's
Speaker 1: really cooking up. Scaling up the production of an m
Speaker 1: R and A vaccine still takes some finesse. Though. If
Speaker 1: you cook at home and you cook something with I
Speaker 1: don't know, ten million or a hundred million liters or
Speaker 1: so for a sauce or so, and if you then
Speaker 1: want to make like ten times the sauce for it's
Speaker 1: called Thanksgiving or something, it might not work because then
Speaker 1: everything is a little bit different. So the consistency is different,
Speaker 1: and the way you have to put in your ingredients
Speaker 1: is a little bit different. This initial badge should produce
Speaker 1: enough MR and a material to make about eight million
Speaker 1: doses of vaccine. If the process succeeds, BioNTech should be
Speaker 1: able to stockpile the test batches and ship them to
Speaker 1: customers by April. But if something goes wrong, they'll have
Speaker 1: to try again. Sis says, this could be something as
Speaker 1: small as a contamination caused by a puncture and a
Speaker 1: sterile glove wrapper. It's not a slam dunk that this works.
Speaker 1: That's why you prepare everything with ten ten sets of
Speaker 1: ice actually and planet meticulously that that it works for
Speaker 1: the first time. It's a key week. Yes, it's a
Speaker 1: key week. Yes so far. By On text says everything
Speaker 1: has gone well. If everything continues like this, the factory
Speaker 1: is on track to be able to make up to
Speaker 1: two and fifty million doses of the vaccine in the
Speaker 1: first half of this year. And that was Naomi Kraski
Speaker 1: And that's it for our show to Day. For coverage
Speaker 1: of the outbreak from one and twenty bureaus around the world,
Speaker 1: visit Bloomberg dot com slash coronavirus and if you like
Speaker 1: the show, please leave us a review and a rating
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Speaker 1: help more listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily
Speaker 1: edition is produced by Top for foreheads Magnus and Rickson
Speaker 1: and me Laura Carlson. Today's main story was reported by
Speaker 1: Naomi Kresky. Original music by Leo Sidrin. Our editors are
Speaker 1: Rick Shine and Francesco Levi. Francesco Levi is Bloomberg's head
Speaker 1: of podcasts. Thanks for listening.