Enabling rapid vaccine development through manufacturing innovation and process efficiency

Sponsor

The global effort to fight COVID saw the fastest vaccine rollout of all time, saving millions of lives. With the ongoing demand for COVID vaccines and the threat of future pandemics, maintaining and building global vaccine manufacturing capacity has never been more important.

In March, Vaccine Insights and Thermo Fisher Scientific will bring together a panel of vaccine manufacturing experts to discuss how they are meeting the need for rapid, flexible, and affordable vaccine production – and what we can learn from the accelerated development and manufacture of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines.

Attend this webinar to learn about:

Key bottlenecks in scaling up vaccine production and how they can be overcome
Increasing process intensification
Challenges and key learnings from manufacturing new modalities e.g., mRNA
Valuable technology innovations, particularly in downstream bioprocessing

Cleo Kontoravdi, PhD

Professor of Biological Systems Engineering, Imperial College London

Cleo Kontoravdi received MEng and PhD degrees in Chemical Engineering from Imperial College London and then joined Lonza Biologics as a Research and Development Scientist. In 2007 she went back to Imperial as a Lonza/RCUK Fellow in Biopharmaceuticals Processing, where she is currently professor of Biological Systems Engineering. Her research involves the development of comprehensive platforms that synergize modeling with experimentation for bioprocess understanding, design, and optimization. She collaborates extensively with industrial partners, including GSK, AstraZeneca, Amgen, and vaccine manufacturers around the world.

Murali Muralidhara, PhD

Chief Manufacturing Officer, RVAC Medicines

Murali Muralidhara (Murali), PhD, is the CMO at RVAC Medicines, where he oversees CMC, development, manufacturing, and supply chain of mRNA-based vaccines and therapeutic products and global IT functions. He has over 22 years of technical and leadership experience in product development, manufacturing, and commercialization of protein biologics, vaccines, and gene therapy products in large and mid-size pharma organizations. Murali has contributed to product development and approval of nine biologic and vaccine products and over 30 INDs/IMPDs for clinical development across his roles at Pfizer Biotherapeutics, AstraZeneca, Ultragenyx, Acceleron (now Merck), and GSK Vaccines.

Sirat Sikka

Field Applications Scientist, Nucleic Acid Therapeutics, Thermo Fisher Scientific

Sirat Sikka has a Master of Science in Biomanufacturing from North Carolina State University. Her research focused on understanding protein-protein interactions. Her career started as a downstream process development scientist at GlaxoSmithKline Vaccines. The responsibilities included early phase development and optimization for recombinant protein and nucleic acid vaccines. Sirat joined Thermo Fisher Scientific in 2019 as a Purification Applications Scientist and is currently a Field Applications Scientist guiding customers in nucleic acid therapeutics development.

Hao Chen, PhD, MBA

AVP, Vaccines Process R&D, Merck

Dr. Hao Chen is the Associate Vice President in the Process R&D organization at Merck Sharp & Dohme (MSD), leading the process development and GMP manufacturing for vaccine Drug Substance and Drug Product Intermediates, with broad portfolio of all major vaccine modalities from RNA and recombinant proteins to polysaccharide conjugate and live viral vaccines. Before returning to MSD, Dr. Chen led the global DS process development and in-process analytics for mRNA, cell and viral based vaccines at GSK in Belgium. For his first 9-year tenure with MSD, Dr. Chen held various leading roles in biologics process development, CMC leadership, and commercial manufacturing support. He also worked on process development at Amylin Pharmaceuticals and Becton Dickinson.

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