As much of the world struggled to secure Covid-19 vaccine supplies last month, more than 50 million doses were chilling in a warehouse in western India, stacked more than 50 feet high.
The company with the stockpile, Serum Institute of India, used to be little known outside the vaccine industry, but its capacity to ramp up production to more than 70 million doses a month has now put it and India solidly at center stage in the fight against the pandemic.
The U.S., Japan and Australia have just pledged more than $200 million to help Indian companies expand their capacities faster and add one billion doses to the global supply. Tapping India’s vaccine production capabilities was at the center of virtual talks Friday among the leaders of those three countries and India, an alliance trying to counter Chinese expansionism known as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or the Quad.
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India has been the world’s biggest vaccine producer for years. It produces more than half of the volume of the world’s vaccines and has built a specialization in doing large batches of vaccines for emerging markets, which need each shot to cost less than a few dollars.
As mass production and distribution of Covid-19 vaccines has proven difficult, more countries and vaccine producers have been turning to India for help.
“I think a lot of people don’t understand why they can’t get vaccines, why it is so hard to just get supply,” said Serum Institute Chief Executive Adar Poonawalla. “People underestimate manufacturing at scale; sometimes it’s actually harder to manufacture at scale than it is to even develop or invent a vaccine.”
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Before the pandemic, the Serum Institute was already making around 1.5 billion doses of vaccines per year. It has been the go-to supplier for international organizations such as Unicef and emerging markets because it sells most vaccines at less than $1 a dose. It does that, and still makes a profit, by making batches of millions of doses at a time. Over the decades that it has been doing this, it has built special skills, equipment and analytics that few can match.
As soon as its first vial of the cellular material used to create the AstraZeneca vaccine arrived in May, Serum Institute’s scientists started growing enough of it to fill large containers—some able to hold 2,000 liters, or nearly 530 gallons.
Over time, its scientists figured out how to make the doses faster, tinkering with the process to get more out of each batch. The secret, say Serum’s scientists, is knowing how to grow large amounts of cells in bigger bioreactors, the large metal vats used to grow the cells to make vaccines. It is also knowing the right moment to introduce the virus into the cells, as well as when to harvest that virus, which becomes the base for the vaccines.
It took months to understand the best way to mass produce the AstraZeneca vaccine, said Umesh Shaligram, an executive director at Serum. “You have to understand—to kind of sense—how your cells are behaving, how a virus is behaving. It takes a bit of time to understand,” he said. “Each batch you run you understand better.”
