Early manufacturing and scale up of viral vector based candidate for COVID-19
AstraZeneca and Oxford Biomedica this week announced a partnership for a minimum one-year Clinical & Commercial Supply Agreement for the GMP manufacture of the adenovirus vector based COVID-19 vaccine candidate, AZD1222, which recently entered clinical trials at multiple sites in the UK.
Oxford Biomedica is working alongside AstraZeneca and other manufacturing organizations to provide large scale manufacturing capacity for this vaccine candidate.
As part of the agreement, AstraZeneca will have access to Oxford Biomedica’s new manufacturing center Oxbox, located in Oxford, UK. In April 2020 Oxford Biomedica announced that it had joined a consortium including the Jenner Institute in relation to the potential for large scale manufacture of AZD1222. On April 30, AstraZeneca and Oxford University subsequently announced an agreement to enable global development, manufacturing and distribution of the vaccine.
The initial agreement requires Oxford Biomedica to provide AstraZeneca with multiple batches of vaccine, the majority of which are expected to be produced throughout 2020. The production will be from one of the Group’s recently approved GMP suites in Oxbox. The agreement may be extended further depending on the progression of the program.
