Biotech Billionaire Launches Large Vaccine Manufacturing Plant in South Africa

Patrick Soon-Shiong, South African-born head of biotech firms NantWorks and ImmunityBio, has launched a new manufacturing facility in South Africa with the goal of producing 1 billion COVID-19 vaccines annually by 2025 on a continent that has seen a dearth of vaccines during the pandemic.

ImmunityBio is working on an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine that it endeavors to use as a universal booster. The vaccine targets the nucleocapsid protein at the center of the coronavirus, which isn’t as vulnerable to mutation as the spike proteins pinpointed by other vaccines.

The Cape Town facility, a collaborative effort with the South African government and universities there, could become the biggest such plant on the continent. It will be the first to make the formula across every stage, rather than producing it from semi-finished batches.