They are busy building on an industrial estate in a suburb of Cape Town. The biotechnology company Afrigen is expanding. A young scientist shows the new spaces where it should be done: making the first mRNA corona vaccine on African soil.
It is part of a new project, supported by the World Health Organization among others, to make low-income countries less dependent on the West in the future when it comes to access to corona vaccines.
Vaccination programs in middle and low-income countries got off to a slow start in this corona pandemic, partly because many rich countries went hoarding. On the African continent, on average, only 7.5 percent of people are fully vaccinated. By way of comparison: in the European Union this percentage is 68 percent.
And while some countries do have supplies at the moment, many donations are still needed in the end.
Experiment
Until now, the labs of this company have mainly been working on vitamins and cannabis oil. “This is a great new challenge,” says director and professor Petro Terblanche. They are going to try to make a vaccine similar to Moderna’s, she says.
She chooses her words carefully. They can’t make a copy of Moderna, because they don’t have the exact formula. For a long time, there has been pressure on pharmaceuticals to share it so that vaccine production can be expanded and the whole world has easier access to it. The United States and South Africa, among others, have been arguing for a while for the temporary cancellation of patents, but have found a closed door.
Yet here they are confident that they are going to figure it out. “Some of the information is public,” Terblanche said. “We have the genetic code, but we also have to experiment.” They do this not only with the help of South African universities, among other things. The biggest challenge: ‘lipid nano particles’, the fat vesicle, in which the mRNA is packaged to protect it in the body.
Ideally, they would also like to adapt the vaccine: it must become cheaper and will hopefully no longer have to be stored under low temperatures, something that causes logistical problems in many low-income countries.
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