It is ‘extremely’ important to scale up the production of vaccines for the pertinent diseases faced by many countries in Africa, State Minister of Health Yvan Butera said, noting that the current mRNA technology is the solution.

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This was during the Africa Business Forum themed "Boosting Africa’s transformation through education, science, technology, and innovation”, intending to promote an ongoing dialogue between the private and the public sectors in Africa, in Ethiopia.

Going through different pillars needed to build an enabled health ecosystem in Africa that can deal with emerging and persistent diseases, Butera said that the first step is to understand the burden of diseases on the continent.

"If you look at the African demographics and epidemiology, we are facing the double burden of unfinished business of infectious diseases and an issue of non-communicable diseases namely, cancer and cardiovascular diseases, among others,” he said.

However, he pointed out that the mRNA technology acquired through the partnership with a BioNTech company to set up a vaccine manufacturing plant in Kigali is flexible enough to deal with all the diseases, hence, "extremely important to scale on the continent and be able to respond to any emerging pathogen.”

In 2023, Rwanda inaugurated the first-ever BioNTech m-RNA-based vaccine manufacturing plant on the continent, following the completion of establishing BioNTainer facilities.

This plant can produce 50 million to 100 million doses of vaccine per year — potentially sufficing the entire continent, Butera said.

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When it comes to research and development, he emphasised the importance of investing in higher education in basic sciences and translational research at the PhD and post-doctorate levels. He highlighted the necessity of establishing these programmes in Africa in collaboration with partners worldwide.

Additionally, he said that clinical trials need to be run on the continent to understand the burden of disease, their specificity, variance, and response to vaccines.

He mentioned that Rwanda has 10 clinical trial sites working on different diseases and molecules that are pertinent for the country but can be extrapolated to other parts of the continent at a certain extent.

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However, this goes hand-in-hand with harmonised regulatory frameworks that facilitate the production of vaccines of top-notch quality, something that the official believes will be harnessed by the African Medicines Agency (AMA), an African Union agency intended to facilitate the harmonisation of medical products regulation to improve access to quality, safe and efficacious medical products on the continent.

Based on the value chain, Butera noted: "The big question is how can we build our systems to scale something that has worked and deploy it in different parts of regions to serve the continent. There is a model that shows that vaccine manufacturing in Africa works, we just need to take it up and scale it.”

Rwanda, like other African countries, is advancing by building a whole health ecosystem that will promote resilience and self-reliance when it comes to the prevention and response to health threats on the continent.