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Tesla chief Elon Musk teams up with Covid-19 player CureVac to build 'RNA microfactories'
Elon Musk has joined the global tech crusade now underway to revolutionize vaccine manufacturing — now aimed at delivering billions of doses of a new mRNA vaccine to fight Covid-19. And he’s cutting right to the front.
In a late-night tweet Wednesday, the Tesla chief announced:
Tesla, as a side project, is building RNA microfactories for CureVac & possibly others
That’s not a lot to go on. But the tweet comes a year after Tesla’s German division in Grohmann and CureVac filed a patent on a “bioreactor for RNA in vitro transcription, a method for RNA in vitro transcription, a module for transcribing DNA into RNA and an automated apparatus for RNA manufacturing.” CureVac, in the meantime, has discussed a variety of plans to build microfactories that can speed up the whole process for a global supply chain.
The whole mRNA idea is simple enough: Deliver instructions to cells to make drugs, or in the case of a vaccine, the antigen needed to kick up an immune response. As the patent goes on to describe, though, the current GMP compliant manufacturing tech in use can be intensely complex and time consuming.
This new approach could — theoretically — bypass all that, creating a manufacturing template that could be reproduced around the world, to deliver as much vaccine as needed in a short period of time, revolutionizing a process that takes time and large investments.
Musk, who stirs plenty of love and hate among the millions of people who watch his every move, clearly loves the tech involved. And it goes much further than Covid-19. Another late-night tweet noted:
In principle, I think synthetic RNA (and DNA) has amazing potential. This basically makes the solution to many diseases a software problem.
The worldwide pandemic now underway has presented an enormous challenge beyond cutting the development process from years to months. Even if a safe and effective vaccine is developed, it takes billions of doses to stop the virus. And that can take as much time or longer than the optimistic development times that are now being discussed by a host of players in the race.
A little more than a year ago — and around the same time Tesla and the biotech filed their patent — CureVac won a $34 million award from CEPI to develop what it calls an RNA Printer manufacturing facility “capable of producing several grams of LNP-formulated mRNA (enough to produce more than a hundred thousand doses), within just a few weeks. This platform can also produce mRNA vaccine candidates against multiple pathogens using the same technology, saving time and reducing costs compared with other vaccine platform