You are the globally distributed vaccine manufacturing revolution.
January 21, 2021 4:30 PM Subscribe
Exploring the Supply Chain of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines Somewhat technical (but fascinating) summary of how the giant poly-dimensional intermeshing of modern industrial and scientific society is used to validate, produce, formulate, package, distribute, administer and monitor COVID-19 vaccines to billions of people.
Found in the excellent In The Pipeline article about what happens when you get injected with mRNA vaccines.
Found in the excellent In The Pipeline article about what happens when you get injected with mRNA vaccines.
This is a great essay; for anyone who is put off by the title, it is very engagingly written, while also sticking closely to its main mission. When I first started reading it last night I noticed the tiny navigation bar and thought Huh, must have a long comments section -- but no, it's just incredibly detailed and kept me reading well past bedtime. They key question that keeps you going is "what is the rate limiting step here?" What can't we accelerate easily? As far as I can tell, it's making the lipid nanoparticles that go around the mRNA, but even this massive essay was a little light on why exactly that's so hard.
posted by chortly at 7:03 PM on January 21, 2021 [5 favorites]
posted by chortly at 7:03 PM on January 21, 2021 [5 favorites]
Very accurate and mostly not wrong! The author does gloss over the problem of repurifying mRNA in bulk from a rather complex reaction mixture, which is easy enough for research use but would have to be done to a much higher standard for human use. As others have mentioned the LNP secret sauce is not fully explained but it probably took 10 years of time and 500 person-years of hard work. They had to come up with a vesicle which does not fall apart, packages mRNA effectively, evades the immune system to a degree, is a uniform size, and releases the mRNA once inside a cell. I have seen the acknowledgement slides for other LNP projects and the teams are never less than 30 people - these folks also had scale up issues that have never ever been encountered before.
posted by benzenedream at 11:11 PM on January 21, 2021 [8 favorites]
posted by benzenedream at 11:11 PM on January 21, 2021 [8 favorites]
I took the title literally, and thought this was about a vaccine which can spread itself like a virus, which seems like it would be the next logical step - googling it, it does seem to be an area of research that actually exists, which is cool!
posted by Jon Mitchell at 1:09 AM on January 22, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by Jon Mitchell at 1:09 AM on January 22, 2021 [1 favorite]
Very good article I'm slowly working through, and it does show details of how it's a really hard process.... but
but, even given the incompetence of the previous administration, this is a problem that shut down the world! I just do not get why there is not a more massive push in every sector to aid the pushing out vaccines. There are many drug companies, there must be several that could be re-tooled to produce more of these vaccines. There must be a large number of trained medics in the military that could be staged at locations around the country ready to just jab massive numbers. Again it shut down the world, there should be an unprecedented response.
Finally saw one headline at least asking the question, "Biden administration is trying to figure out what’s delaying Covid vaccine", but why are the news people not digging into the details of the entire supply chain? Canada got stiffed last week, why is there not more detail about 'continuing manufacturing disruptions at its facility in Belgium'?
As this article elucidates vaccines are vastly harder than most of us can imagine, but the world is friggen shutdown, why is there not a bigger response?
posted by sammyo at 6:14 AM on January 22, 2021
but, even given the incompetence of the previous administration, this is a problem that shut down the world! I just do not get why there is not a more massive push in every sector to aid the pushing out vaccines. There are many drug companies, there must be several that could be re-tooled to produce more of these vaccines. There must be a large number of trained medics in the military that could be staged at locations around the country ready to just jab massive numbers. Again it shut down the world, there should be an unprecedented response.
Finally saw one headline at least asking the question, "Biden administration is trying to figure out what’s delaying Covid vaccine", but why are the news people not digging into the details of the entire supply chain? Canada got stiffed last week, why is there not more detail about 'continuing manufacturing disruptions at its facility in Belgium'?
As this article elucidates vaccines are vastly harder than most of us can imagine, but the world is friggen shutdown, why is there not a bigger response?
posted by sammyo at 6:14 AM on January 22, 2021
what happens when you get injected with mRNA vaccines.
Too many words, not enough interpretative dance.
posted by basalganglia at 8:25 AM on January 22, 2021 [3 favorites]
Too many words, not enough interpretative dance.
posted by basalganglia at 8:25 AM on January 22, 2021 [3 favorites]
why is there not more detail about 'continuing manufacturing disruptions at its facility in Belgium'?
They’ve halted production temporarily to retrofit the manufacturing line for higher capacity.
Obviously, it would be nice if there were more redundancy in the system to minimize the impact this kind of thing has on supply.
posted by mr_roboto at 8:26 AM on January 22, 2021
They’ve halted production temporarily to retrofit the manufacturing line for higher capacity.
Obviously, it would be nice if there were more redundancy in the system to minimize the impact this kind of thing has on supply.
posted by mr_roboto at 8:26 AM on January 22, 2021
(but no, this is a really good pair of essays, everyone should read them (while beating a tambourine and shouting "tRNA!" at intervals))
posted by basalganglia at 8:26 AM on January 22, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by basalganglia at 8:26 AM on January 22, 2021 [2 favorites]
While I'm sympathetic to the difficulties of making lipid nanoparticles, what I'm not sympathetic to is that we don't know precisely how it is done and what precisely are the difficult steps. Moderna and Pfizer seem to be reluctant to share the "secret sauce," which is unacceptable right now. In general these things should be patented and public, so the whole world can dedicate itself to figuring out any optimizations these two companies might have overlooked. But of course there's a lot more to it than "read the literature and the patents", and at this stage we need something like the DPA to force them to divulge the exact steps and not just give us a list of ingredients, machines, and various papers to read the methods sections of.
posted by chortly at 4:53 PM on January 22, 2021 [5 favorites]
posted by chortly at 4:53 PM on January 22, 2021 [5 favorites]
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"Some syringes are specifically advertised as “low dead-volume syringes” and have tens of microliters lower dead volume than those not advertised as such. Multiply that by five doses per vial for Pfizer-BioNTech or 10 doses per vial for Moderna, and you get a number in the same order of magnitude as a vaccination dose. This explains why some vaccination sites report finding extra doses in many vials: They are working with supply kits that contain low dead-volume syringes." Ah, thanks, that makes sense.
posted by MonkeyToes at 5:21 PM on January 21, 2021 [5 favorites]