The need to rapidly scale up production, while maintaining the validated process, in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic left many pharmaceutical manufacturers questioning their increasingly offshore supply chains. But what is the answer when it comes to shoring up supply of raw materials and ensuring production requirements can be met?
Pharmaceutical manufacturing supply chains are complex and, as highlighted by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, also fragile.
The global Covid-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc with pharmaceutical manufacturing supply chains since it began. At a time when supplies of Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs), intermediaries and additives needed to be as solid and reliable as ever, it was the very thing they were needed to combat, Covid-19, that was disrupting their availability.
Covid-19 triggered greater demand for drugs
The global health emergency caused by the COVID-19 pandemic led to an unprecedented level of scientific collaboration and achievement, resulting in no fewer than 17 approved vaccines (at time of writing), with a further 117 candidates currently undergoing clinical trials.
However, while demand for COVID vaccines is sky-high — 14bn doses are estimated to be needed by the end of 2021, according to Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance — the process of scaling up manufacturing of these vaccines from zero to billions has not been without its challenges.
Having had to discard up to 15m vaccine doses in March when materials for its vaccine were mixed up with AstraZeneca’s, Johnson & Johnson’s COVID vaccine experienced another setback recently as lingering production holdups led to zero doses being shipped one week in May.
Nevertheless, Gavi says the current capacity for COVID-19 vaccines alone is three times the annual doses produced each year for all other vaccines combined. This highlights just how remarkable the COVID-19 vaccine production drive has been. But supply issues have resulted in some countries imposing export bans for vaccines or for some of the components used to manufacture them. These bans, plus a global shipping crisis and rising API costs, caused a major bottleneck, as big an issue in supply as insufficient manufacturing capacity.