SK Bioscience to produce Covid vaccine for CEPI for another year

[Photo provided by SK Bioscience]

SK Bioscience said on Wednesday it has signed a contract with the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) to extend capacity reservations for manufacturing Covid-19 vaccines for another year to the end of 2022 at its Andong Plant L-House in South Korea.

Under the agreement, the Korean drug producer will support the goal of CEPI and its COVAX partners to produce 2 billion doses of vaccine by the end of 2021.

The signing ceremony held in Brussel on Tuesday was attended by CEPI CEO Richard Hatchett, SK Discovery Vice Chairman Chey Chang-won and SK Bioscience CEO Ahn Jae-yong.

In June last year CEPI secured capacity to manufacture Covid jabs through the L-House facility and in August Novavax became the first vaccine developer to enter into a manufacturing agreement with SK Bioscience to use the reserved capacity.

Vaccines manufactured under the agreement will be procured and distributed through the COVAX Facility, the financing mechanism led by the World Health Organization to enable equitable access to Covid vaccines for all participating countries.

The L-House facility, which obtained EU-GMP (Good Manufacturing Practice) certification earlier this year, is for large-scale commercial production of hundreds of millions of vaccine doses per year. Multiple types of vaccines can be manufactured simultaneously through independent production facilities for stock solution.

SK Bioscience is in talks with several global vaccine developers for contract production under the latest capacity reservation deal.

Under a direct contract manufacturing organization (CMO) agreement with AstraZeneca, SK Bioscience is producing the stock solution and final product of a Covid vaccine developed by the British company.

SK Bioscience is also developing its own Covid vaccine GBP510 with support from CEPI.

[ⓒ Maeil Business Newspaper & mk.co.kr, All rights reserved]