A new report from CPhI explores the potential implications in 2021 of impending vaccine approvals, a new administration in the White House and a return to dual supply chain strategies.

The report – which summarises expert analysis into 12 key findings – foresees a particularly positive outlook for the pharma manufacturing supply chain, as a result of the demand for increased second source contingencies, alongside the huge scale-up of vaccine capacity currently underway. A consequence of which is likely to encourage expansion across the contract services sector for all product classes and therapy areas.

Interestingly, the CPhI report highlights that ‘forgotten priorities’ of recent years like AMR (anti-microbial resistance), and continuous manufacturing will return – with the latter potentially simulating new manufacturing approaches for novel applications like RNA technologies.

In the most immediate trend predicted, the report highlights that the likely initial stage of global vaccines roll-out will see some degree of ‘vaccine nationalism’ – with the first doses kept for home markets – before scale-up is achieved and global availability frees-up towards the summer of 2021.

The report’s experts suggest pointedly that enough capacity is available to complete over four billion dose of vaccines, so long as it is allocated appropriately, with approved drugs given preferential access to available capacity.

The mass rollout of vaccines was also highlighted as a highly positive development for CDMOs, with increased production needed not just in vaccines, but in all areas so that pharma companies can potentially concentrate on scale-up. In another boon to the supply chain, the shift towards dual sourcing and integrity is leading to more strategic partnerships and ‘capacity reservations’. 

As a consequence, this will shrink the pool of available capacity, but also spur increased capacity building by CDMOs. Potentially this means some short-term capacity constraints particularly for smaller biotechs with earlier stage products, but longer term (2022 onwards), an increased availability of resources – potentially helping to exopodite innovation timelines over the next five years.

Significantly, the digitisation of API sourcing is likely to accelerate with many companies seeing step change improvements in business costs, with digital, real-time and virtual auditing to continue to advance both in scale and capability quickly.