Catalent Awarded Vaccine Research Grant

Catalent announced on April 20 that it has received a 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; the goal of the consortium is to develop a scalable manufacturing process for vaccines that are stable and temperature independent.

A project fund of €5.3 million has been awarded as part of Horizon 2020, the European Union research and innovation framework program, 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, Manufacturing process for Cold-chain Independent Virosome-based Vaccines (MACIVIVA),  is scheduled to run for 3.5 years and brings together expertise in 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).

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

Source: Catalent Pharma Solutions