A model-based quantification of the impact of new manufacturing technologies on developing country vaccine supply chain performance: A Kenyan case study

Vaccine manufacture currently follows a centralized approach dominated by large-scale, nonflexible, and product-specific facilities, which require high investment costs. Emerging vaccine platform technologies, such as RNA vaccines, outer membrane vesicle vaccines with genetically customizable membrane antigens (customOMV), virus-like particle vaccines with genetically configurable epitopes (customVLP), and humanized yeast-produced vaccines, as well as new intensified out-scalable biomanufacturing processes will enable a decentralized manufacturing approach. This is anticipated to be faster to produce, flexible, and implementable at locations with high vaccine demand. In this work, we quantify the potential impact of these technologies on the Kenyan supply chain network. Here, we have employed techno-economic modeling and mixed integer optimization to investigate the impact of novel vaccine manufacturing technologies on the profitability of supply chain logistics in Kenya. The model results indicate that: (a) manufacturing accounts for the highest proportion of the total supply chain costs, (b) the cost per dose of vaccines produced using emerging platform technologies can be an order of magnitude lower compared to the dose cost of inactivated polio vaccines, and (c) the use of intensified production processes contained inside isolators render small-scale distributed manufacturing economically viable.