PHARMACEUTICALS
These will require commercial-scale contract manufacturing . So far , vaccines have won over therapies in the fight against COVID-19 . Several highly efficacious vaccines are now available , but significant room for improvement remains in COVID-19 treatments . The scale of vaccine production now dwarfs that of therapies , which are only indicated for sick patients and then only in certain circumstances . There is still the possibility of a breakthrough in COVID-19 therapies . If one such therapy is found to be safe and efficacious , there will likely be a flurry of contract manufacturing agreements . There are still unmet needs in this area , as vaccine distribution takes time , vaccine efficacy is not 100 % and certain parts of the population will not receive a vaccine or will not have a strong immune response . Many of the promising clinical-stage therapies and marketed therapies are monoclonal antibodies ( often repurposed from development in other indications ). Their manufacture requires CMOs with specialised biologic capabilities .
Top CMOs strike deals
The CMOs benefiting most from COVID-19 vaccine development so far , by number of contracts that have been disclosed , are Catalent , Lonza and Emergent BioSolutions . Emergent ’ s contracts skew toward vaccine manufacture , whereas Catalent ’ s and Lonza ’ s are more evenly split between vaccines and therapies . Many other C ( D ) MOs have also benefitted ( Figure 2 ). Those that only have outsourced contract services and are not the Marketing Authorisation
Holder ( MAH ) of a drug offer a dedicated contract manufacturing model . Pharmaceutical companies that produce their own products and also offer contract services using their excess production capacity , but who are also MAHs , offer an excess capacity manufacturing model . Catalent and Lonza are well known CDMO industry leaders . Catalent ’ s 11 publicly disclosed COVID-19 contracts to date are each for a different product , and are split between six therapies and five vaccines . The ‣
Figure 1 – Pipeline COVID-19 vaccines & therapies Source – GlobalData
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