Catalent Awarded Grant as Part of Vaccine Research Consortium

Catalent has received a significant project grant as part of a consortium looking to evaluate, develop and manufacture thermo stable and cold-chain independent nano-pharmaceutical virosome-based vaccine candidates.

Currently, 90% of existing vaccines are cold-chain dependent, and the goal of the consortium is to develop a scalable manufacturing process for vaccines that are stable and temperature independent.

A total project fund of €5.3 million has been awarded as part of Horizon 2020, the European Union (EU) research and innovation framework programme, with additional funding of up to €3.1 million from the Swiss State Secretariat Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) for the Swiss-based consortium partners, resulting in a total project grant of €8.4 million (USD8.9 million). The EU Horizon 2020 project is named MACIVIVA, which stands for “Manufacturing process for Cold-chain Independent Virosome-based Vaccines”. The project duration is in total 3.5 years and brings together world class expertise in the field of virosome vaccines, manufacturing, spray drying, freeze drying and analytical techniques from the pharmaceutical industry.

Catalent’s Swindon, UK facility, the manufacturing hub of its Zydis fast-dissolve formulation technology, will receive a portion of the total fund with the balance being distributed amongst the other consortium partners: Mymetics SA (Switzerland), Mymetics BV (Netherlands); Chimera Biotech Gmbh (Germany); Upperton Ltd. (UK); and Bachem AG (Switzerland).

“Catalent is pleased to be part of this consortium of cross-industry partners bringing innovative technologies together to address a serious global issue in the over-reliance on the cold chain with existing vaccines,” commented Barry Littlejohns, Catalent’s President of Advanced Delivery Technologies. “Zydis is the world’s best-in-class, orally disintegrating tablet technology, and we believe our experience and expertise in this area can add substantially to the project as a whole. Because of the supply chain constraints, large populations are denied access to vaccines, so we, as a group, recognize the importance and potential of this work for global vaccine development.”

The MACIVIVA project will receive funding from the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 646122.