BioNTech Supercharges a Factory to Produce More Covid Vaccine
The German drugmaker is retrofitting a former Novartis facility to supply 750 million doses a year of mRNA, the key ingredient in its inoculations.
On the outskirts of Marburg, a small college town in Germany, a handful of hazmat-clad workers from coronavirus vaccine manufacturer BioNTech SE anxiously huddled around a clean-room lab bench on Feb. 9, as a chain of chemical reactions silently unfolded inside a giant plastic bioreactor bag. This was the moment of truth for the company’s new factory, hastily retrofitted to produce 750 million doses a year of one of the most sought-after products in the world: the active ingredient for the messenger RNA vaccine sold by BioNTech and its partner Pfizer Inc.
Demand for the vaccine, which BioNTech initially created, has been so massive that the partnership’s manufacturing facilities—a BioNTech mRNA plant in Mainz, Germany, three Pfizer factories in the U.S., facilities belonging to several other production partners across Europe, and Pfizer’s formulation and vial-filling operation in Belgium—can’t meet it. So the German company has spent five frantic months navigating paperwork, retraining workers, and renovating the Marburg site to get it ready to produce more mRNA.