Accelerated production setup for Covid-19 vaccine

With the help of Siemens, the Mainz-based biotech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny BioN­Tech SE has con­vert­ed an exist­ing plant in Mar­burg for the pro­duc­tion of the Covid19 vac­cine in record time. The pro­duc­tion plant has been pro­duc­ing the active sub­stance since Feb­ru­ary and the vac­cine BNT162b2 (also known as COMIRNATY®) since the end of March. BioN­Tech acquired a pro­duc­tion facil­i­ty for this in the fall of 2020 that was already equipped with capa­bil­i­ties for producing
biotech­no­log­i­cal substances.
Through col­lab­o­ra­tion with Siemens and the team of experts on site in Mar­burg, the project time­line for con­vert­ing the exist­ing facil­i­ty for the pro­duc­tion of mRNA-vac­cine was cut from around one year down to five months, where­by the imple­men­ta­tion of key parts of the new Man­u­fac­tur­ing Exe­cu­tion Sys­tem (MES) was reduced to two and half months. The new sys­tem and end-to-end dig­i­tal­iza­tion of pro­duc­tion enable con­ver­sion to “paper­less doc­u­men­ta­tion of pro­duc­tion”, which can imme­di­ate­ly ful­fill all doc­u­men­ta­tion require­ments. The entire process flow is con­trolled using Siemens prod­ucts: The Opcen­ter Exe­cu­tion Phar­ma MES is used to orches­trate sub­sys­tems and process­es and to ana­lyze their qual­i­ty. Pro­duc­tion process­es can be auto­mat­i­cal­ly devel­oped, opti­mized and managed.
mRNA process­es encom­pass a num­ber of man­u­al work steps, such as weigh­ing, which can now be per­formed by Siemens weigh­ing sys­tems, as pre­cise mea­sure­ment of weight is vital for prod­uct qual­i­ty. All sys­tems were mod­i­fied for automa­tion using the Simat­ic PCS 7 process con­trol sys­tem, which con­trols and reg­u­lates the sys­tem process­es. Oth­er prod­ucts used include net­work tech­nol­o­gy, WLAN access points, com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nol­o­gy and the TIA Por­tal engi­neer­ing framework.
Siemens sup­ports sys­tem imple­men­ta­tion for pro­duc­tion start­up at BioN­Tech with in-depth ser­vice and on-call readi­ness. Siemens and BioN­Tech enjoy a long tra­di­tion of part­ner­ship col­lab­o­ra­tion and have inten­si­fied their coop­er­a­tion for Covid-19 vac­cine production.