A proprietary bioproduction system for vaccines is available on the market. Univercells is a biomanufacturing company that designed the new system, Nevoline, with resource support from Batavia Biosciences and Merck.
The first NevoLine system will be installed in Batavia Biosciences’ polio dedicated Biosafety level 3 Facility in Leiden, the Netherlands though it was developed by the Belgian-based Univercells.
NevoLine is an automated system that facilitates safer, faster and closed bioprocessing with a smaller footprint. Through intensification and chaining of unit steps into a continuous process, the process has high yields with less time and money invested.
Dr Pierre A Morgon, Non-Executive Director and Advisor to the CEO of Univercells, said: “Public health stands to gain handsomely from these new market dynamics, with biotherapeutics and vaccines being available in large enough volumes and at affordable prices.”
NevoLine, has been given a grant extension of US$4 million designated towards scaling up the original manufacturing platform. The extension follows the original $12m grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to deliver affordable inactivated polio vaccine (sIPV).
The first NevoLine system is capable of a five-fold reduction in cost compared to current manufacturing technologies.
Hugues Bultot, Univercells CEO and co-founder, said: “This was a challenging two-year project aimed at delivering a new manufacturing system to drastically decrease cost, footprint and time to market for vaccine manufacturers, and we are pleased to have met these goals.”