New Biotage Facility Tackles mRNA Vaccine Bottleneck

Biotage (Uppsala, Sweden) has announced an expansion of its production capacity of large-scale flash columns by 300% at a new production facility in Cardiff, UK. The expansion will allow Biotage to help pharmaceutical companies and contract manufacturers to scale-up lipid production for COVID-19 vaccines.

“Our customers needed to manufacture their products on a significantly larger scale, and we were able to invest in an expansion of our existing production facilities to support their requirements. We were very pleased to be able to deliver this expansion in just over four months in order to meet the needs of present and potential new clients,” said Anders Wikström, EVP Operations of Biotage.

The availability of raw materials for mRNA vaccine production has been a major bottleneck as the lipids that were needed for new lipid nanoparticle (LNP) formulations, which are used in mRNA vaccines, were not previously available on the scale needed to produce billions of doses of vaccine globally.

The newly opened production facility will enable Biotage to meet the increase in demand for this vital market segment.

For more information, please visit: www.biotage.com