Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, how many UK based manufacturing facilities are capable of re-engineering and manufacturing (a) mRNA, (b) viral vector, (c) whole virus and (d) protein subunit vaccines to address emerging variants of the covid-19 virus.

The Government has made several strategic investments in UK vaccine manufacturing capabilities to increase its capacity, ensuring we are able to manufacture across different vaccine technologies and embed resilience. This includes:

• The acceleration and expansion of flexible vaccine manufacturing capabilities at the UK’s first Vaccine Manufacturing and Innovation Centre (VMIC) in Harwell.
• Collaborating with the Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult to fund a state-of-the-art Manufacturing Innovation Centre in Braintree.
• Expansion of the Valneva factory in Livingston, Scotland, which is capable of whole virus manufacture.

Both the VMIC and Braintree sites are flexible to vaccine types, including messenger RNA (mRNA), viral vector, and protein sub-unit. These sites could have a role in providing capability to manufacture vaccines to address the emerging variants of the COVID-19 virus.

The Government has also invested through UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) to support the creation of a new Centre of Excellence in mRNA vaccine manufacture at the Centre for Process Innovation (CPI), with equipment that can manufacture mRNA for vaccines. This funding has upgraded CPI’s National Biologics Manufacturing Centre at Darlington to obtain good manufacturing practice certification for the manufacture of RNA products including mRNA for clinical trials. A key advantage of RNA vaccines is how quickly they can be developed compared with other platforms.