In June, BARDA finally signed contracts worth $ 347 million with two American bottle makers. The first, New York-based Corning, has a long history of working with vaccine manufacturers. Its Pyrex glass was used to bottle the first polio vaccines in the 1950s. Today, it makes “millions of vials per month,” a company spokesperson told Business Insider earlier this week. By infusing BARDA cash, the company expects to increase that number tenfold over the next three years, according to the spokesperson.
But closing the glass gap will take time. Supply chain experts say that starting a new manufacturing site capable of producing an additional 100-500 million vials per year will take at least six to eight months. That is if glass vial manufacturers can get the raw materials to power those production lines. Medical glass must be able to withstand large temperature changes and keep chemically fussy vaccine components stable. Doing so requires melting a particularly angular kind of sand found on beaches and riverbeds, with grains irregular enough to come together to form a solid solid glass. This type of sand is in such high demand, for use on everything from solar panels to concrete, that it has sparked a violent boom in illegal sand mining in recent years. A major United Nations report released last year called sand mining “one of the major sustainability challenges of the 21st century.”
Whether or not vaccine manufacturers are faced with a creaking glass will depend on how quickly they come up with a vaccine. “If we’re talking about having the first vaccine candidates up and running early next year, then I don’t think we should be so concerned about glass,” says Prashant Yadav, health care supply chain researcher at the Center for Development. Global. If, on the other hand, any of the top vaccine candidates currently or about to enter Phase 3 testing turn out to be box office hits (data expected to arrive before the end of the year), then there could be a problem. “We will not have the means to distribute it widely, because we will not yet have the vials,” says Yadav.
To guard against a more immediate deficit, BARDA is betting on a company that has developed vial manufacturing technology that is not based on the traditional sand-to-glass supply chain. Instead, it uses sophisticated manufacturing processes in Silicon Valley to coat an almost imperceptibly thin layer of silicate inside plastic containers. “We’re basically taking the best of glass and plastic and combining the benefits of both into a hybrid material,” says Christopher Weikart, chief scientist at SiO2 Materials Science, who signed a $ 143 partnership with BARDA to make vials to support Covid- 19 vaccination efforts.
Headquartered in Auburn, Alabama, the company has developed many recognizable plastic containers over the years; In the 1960s, he made the first milk jug with handles and later pocket pop-top tubes for mini-M & Ms. It is only since Weikart arrived in 2011 that the company has turned to container production. specifically for the pharmaceutical industry.
Plastic on its own is not an excellent medicine package, especially for so-called “biologics” – the bits of protein, nucleotides, antibodies, and other things that cells often make that comprise an ever-increasing proportion of modern medicines. The properties that make plastic polymers light and durable also make them too breathable. Air, water, and other gases and liquids can easily penetrate them. Plastic polymers can also leak into drugs, causing contamination. Both problems can alter how safe and effective a medicine is when it reaches the patient.
The Weikart team was tasked with figuring out how to make a plastic container that didn’t have these problems. He found the answer in plasma. You know, that fourth state of matter, the one that comes after solid, liquid and gas. Plasma is basically a partially ionized gas, which means that its molecules have been excited to such an extent that electrons escape from their orbits. Brilliant ensues. But more importantly, the process of converting a gas to plasma can be leveraged to place or remove layers of materials from one atom at a time. This is how the electronics industry manufactures almost all integrated circuits, and it is technology that fueled its miniaturization. Those microprocessor chips inside your phone and your computer? Its many layers of materials were deposited or engraved by plasma-based processes.
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