What Technologies Do You Anticipate Disrupting Vaccine Manufacturing And Why?

DISRUPTIONS WILL COME FROM STRATEGICALLY EMPLOYING SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, timely) end-to-end solutions encompassing innovative micro algorithms into the manufacturing environment. These solutions will have integrated and flexible hardware along with AI/machine learning (ML)-aided data analytics. These disruptive technologies will deliver vaccines with low lead time and high responsiveness to manufacturing/bioanalytics changes. They will be scalable and easily set up (e.g., portable) in highly varied operating environments.

One of the significant advantages of the innovative micro capability is it minimizes changeover complexities in reconfiguration and time and maximizes agility to adapt (e.g., from delta to omicron, mRNA vs. live virus viral platform), which often requires different processing steps, quality control testing, and storage prior to distribution.

JACKS LEE is SVP global manufacturing and supply at Merck.