The Walloon company "Univercells", which specialises in biotechnology, has recently received a grant of $12 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop a revolutionary vaccine manufacturing platform. Its aim is to drastically reduce the cost of vaccines whilst increasing their availability and affordability in developing countries.
Of the 175 participants who responded to the call for projects launched by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walloon company was chosen as the winner. The American billionaire has repeatedly emphasised the importance of making high-quality healthcare available to all people, and of the need to vaccinate as many people as possible.
"Since being set up in 2000, the Bill Gates Foundation has become the uncontested global benchmark for humanitarian action, being responsible in particular for improving access to treatments designed to cure 'basic' diseases throughout the world. It is an institution which is courted by multinationals and university laboratories around the world. In other words, it is very difficult to obtain financing from them," explains Hugues Bulot, CEO of Univercells, who is delighted to have received this highly coveted grant.
The project will be led by a consortium which also includes Batavia Biosciences and Natrix Separations. The platform will leverage Univercells' process intensification and integration capabilities and technologies, Natrix’s novel single-use chromatography membrane platform, and Batavia’s vaccine development and manufacturing capabilities. The initial target is to establish a microfacility for inactivated polio vaccine (sIPV). This production facility can deliver 40 million doses of trivalent vaccine per year at a manufacturing cost of less than $0.15 per dose. The platform concept can be applied to any viral vaccine.
The reduced scale and simplified operations that it delivers will lower the hurdles for vaccine manufacturers in developing countries while maintaining high safety and containment.
José Castillo, CTO and co-founder of Univercells, stated: "We are excited about this partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. With Batavia Bioscience and Natrix Separations, our consortium integrates considerable experience, know-how and innovative but proven technologies that tremendously increase manufacturing productivity. As a result, we expect our integrated platform to be a real game-changer for global health."
Based in Gosselies, Univercells is a company which develops biopharmaceutical manufacturing processes. The company aims to drastically reduce the cost of biological medicines to make them accessible to as many people as possible, by reinventing the way in which they are manufactured throughout the world.