If mRNA vaccines for Covid-19 prove themselves, manufacturers may ramp up production surprisingly quickly.

Speculation time: Let’s imagine that Moderna’s messenger RNA vaccine for Covid-19, already in clinical trials, is effective enough for approval. And/or the mRNA candidate from BioNTech, which might begin trials this month. And/or one of the candidates from CureVac or Translate Bio or many other groups feverishly working on mRNA vaccines.

True, no mRNA vaccine candidate has ever been generated in large numbers. So how could we scale up to the billions of doses that the world needs yesterday?

CureVac says it can manufacture millions of doses by this summer. Moderna has built an enormous, fully digital, fully operational, very impressive plant in Norwood, Massachusetts.* The other players are making suitably serious plans.

But beyond that, let’s remember that mRNA medical technology is radically different and one key difference is that it lends itself to extremely fast and flexible manufacturing. It’s built around synthesizing DNA and RNA rather than growing the infinitely idiosyncratic cells in traditional biotech factories. The bioreactor that generates the actual antiviral response is the patient’s body, so the amounts of active ingredient in an mRNA vaccine are almost unimaginably tiny.

And unlike traditional biotech factories, mRNA facilities are designed to rapidly switch between multiple products.

So: When and if one of these mRNA vaccines proves itself, is there any technical reason that all of these companies could not switch their production lines to churn out that one? **

* On April 16th 2020, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) announced funding up to $483 million for Moderna to ramp up. “Plans now call for producing millions of doses in the fall, tens of millions next year.”

** Sanofi plans to make the Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA vaccine, as of January 26 2021.