Sepragen skids to help Serum Institute ramp up vaccine production

Sepragen has delivered two chromatography skids to the Serum Institute of India to help increase monthly production of COVID-19 vaccines from 40 million to 200 million doses.

Bioprocess equipment manufacturer Sepragen Corporation recently shipped out two 125 liters/minute QuantaSep chromatography skids, with integrated inline buffer blending capabilities, to the Serum Institute, located in Pune, India.

“These skids will allow the vaccine manufacturer to increase their production from 40 million doses per month to 200 million doses per month,” a Sepragen spokesperson told us.

Image c/o Sepragen

The Serum Institute, which claims to be the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer by number of doses produced and sold globally, has been a major player in the manufacture of COVID-19 vaccines.

The firm struck a deal last year with AstraZeneca to produce a billion doses of its vaccine, known as Covishield in India, and has also teamed up with Novavax to help produce its prefusion protein vaccine, NVX-CoV2373, yet to reach the market.

“Performing purification at the scale of 7,500 liters per hour would have created a significant bottleneck in the supply of buffers,” Sepragen says.

“Sepragen’s engineers integrated the chromatography function of the skids with the creation of buffers from constituent stock concentrated solutions. As such, buffer preparation was eliminated using multiple pumps and innovative sensor control strategies. Stock solutions are seamlessly blended as the operator performs the run from on a single Human Machine Interface (HMI) with 21 CFR Part 11 compliant software.”