The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will give $40 million, including to a Belgian biotech company and two leading African vaccine manufacturers, in a bid to boost access to mRNA vaccines for protection against various diseases in Africa.
Nivelles-based Quantoom Biosciences will get $20 million to advance work on its mRNA manufacturing platform, while the Institut Pasteur de Dakar in Senegal and Biovac in South Africa will get $5 million each to buy the technology. A further $10 million is available for other vaccine manufacturers who want to use the platform.
The World Health Organization launched its mRNA vaccine technology hub in Cape Town in April this year. One member, Afrigen Biologics, has already made Africa’s first-ever mRNA vaccine for COVID-19 in the lab. Quantoom’s platform, called Ntensify, allows batches of mRNA to be produced more cheaply and efficiently at scale, a Gates Foundation spokeswoman told Reuters ahead of an announcement at its 2023 Grand Challenges Annual Meeting in Dakar on Monday.
Ntensify was first developed using Gates’ funding to Quantoom’s parent company, Univercells, given in 2016.
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