Vaccine manufacturing emerges as outsourcing market
pharmafile | January 28, 2013 | News story | Manufacturing and Production |Â Â R&D, Vaccine, outsourcingÂ
Healthy growth in the market for vaccines – coupled with high production costs – look set to create a vaccine contract manufacturing market worth around $620 million by 2015, says a new report.
Overall the vaccine market will be worth $48 billion in 2015 and experience strong growth across the next decade driven by technological advances and expanding populations, according to the report’s publisher Visiongain.
At the moment manufacturing tends to be carried out in-house by the major players in the vaccines market, although there are some notable outsourcing players such as Catalent, Charles River Laboratories and Lonza, and this means that production capacity is held within just a few producers such as GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Pfizer and Baxter.
A shift away from vaccines based on live, attenuated and inactivated viruses – which have complex manufacturing requirements – to recombinant antigen-based products requiring more commonplace production techniques will also facilitate the growth of the contract vaccine manufacturing sector.
“As pharma and biotech R&D budgets continue to tighten, companies will try to meet healthcare needs through manufacturing processes at lower cost and with improved efficiency,” commented Visiongain analyst Dr Peter Williamson.
“Outsourcing vaccine manufacturing is one solution – having the advantage of flexibility, whereby a company does not have to heavily invest in facilities, equipment and expertise, so it can focus its resources on other areas, such as marketing and R&D,” he added.
The emerging markets in India and China will also become important hubs for vaccine production, driven by healthcare demand in those regions, according to the report, called Vaccine Manufacturing Technology and Services: World Market 2013-2023.
Visiongain says there will be a drive towards cell based production methods, ultimately increasing productivity and efficiency, and as vaccine manufacturing methods become more complex, time-consuming changeovers of production lines will become more frequent.
Phil Taylor
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