The chief executive officer of Germany's BioNTech SE said the biggest challenge facing it and partner Pfizer Inc now that their COVID-19 vaccine is authorized for use in the United States will be to scale up manufacturing to meet huge demand.
"We need to solve the manufacturing challenge, It is very clear that more doses are needed. And we are dealing with that question - how to produce more doses." Ugur Sahin said. The companies have said they will produce up to 1.3 billion doses of the vaccine next year.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized the vaccine for emergency use on Friday after Britain became the first country to start deploying the shot outside of clinical trials earlier in the week. Sahin said he expects the companies will receive conditional approval from the European Medicines Agency by the end of the month and can begin rolling out vaccine in European countries early next year.
One way he hopes to boost supply would be by bringing on earlier than projected the 750-mln-dose-a-year plant BioNTech bought from Novartis AG in Marburg, Germany. BioNTech had said it would begin making the vaccine there in the first half of 2021, and Sahin said they are working to get it up and running on an expedited timeline.
"The baseline plan is 1.3 billion dosesAnd we are working on an extended plan. I can't tell you at the moment what is possible and how much we can expand the scale but we will try to do it significantly." He said.
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