Part of the problem may be that wafer fab people and drug production people don't talk to each other much. Someone should get them talking. Might come to nothing. Might lead to "oh, we can make that easily".
Part of the problem may be that wafer fab people and drug production people don't talk to each other much. Someone should get them talking. Might come to nothing. Might lead to "oh, we can make that easily".
I suspect if you track down what's needed, you'll find that all the manufacturing capability for making more of those machines is already in use by the vaccine makers. Bespoke microfluidics devices aren't common or easy to make, although some components are.
Each new human innovation is based on a massive mountain of previous human innovation. Many, many companies are on the edge of this innovation and allowing them to use the innovations of other companies without fear of patents litigation would allow them to make that last step now.
Patents are one of the most insidious harms we have in our society today. Patent defenders claim that patents protect innovators. The truth is actually the exact opposite: patents are a monopoly legal tactic most often used so that the patent obtainer does not have to innovate further or execute. Patents kill all further innovation in the area they are in. A great example of this is that hundreds of companies used to manufacture aircraft. Boeing and Airbus bought up all the companies that own patents, and now it's nearly impossible to start a new aircraft manufacturing business due to Boeing's monopoly on the patents. Aircraft have changed very little ever since.
We need to eliminate the patent system and allow free trade to actually work.
That's a general rule of thumb, but it's not a law. There are innovations that are non sequels of previous developments. Sometimes inventors think differently than anyone else.
The idea that multiple companies were "almost" on the edge of mRNA vaccines is pretty much proven false by the place the two existing companies got the tech - from the pair of people who developed it, one for each company.
That's billions of people who will be incubating more mutated variants of COVID-19.
And secondly, we'll need that equipment for COVID-19 variant booster shots.
(And will come in handy for vaccinating with a universal flu vaccine, even HIV, etc.)
I was involved in a relatively simple tech transfer of a pharmaceutical agent to a plant in China. We pulled it back to the US because every single batch failed. And it wasn't due to shoddy workmanship since we had US people on the ground directing everything.
What everyone else seems to be saying is that Covid-19 has a bus factor of like 5 or 6 people, who if they died,would lead to any breakdown in the process becoming an irrecoverable incident.
That single point of favor needs to be distributed, not just for production capacity, but for the future safety of the human race.
Call me skeptical. I think it's much more likely that this falls under trade secrets.
This "nationalizing essential drugs" business could set a dangerous precedent after all.
Which is really the issue with all potential fixes: either they are unknown and thus unacceptably risky for something we will use on hundreds of millions (or billions) of people, or if we take the time to get to acceptable risk it will be too late to really help with this issue.
I knew in February or March that the mRNA vaccines were extremely promising. NIH experts knew earlier than I did.
The mRNA approaches had a head start because they had been studying MERS and SARS-1 before COVID-19. They hit the ground running once the sequence of the virus was released. It was known nearly immediately that they were promising approaches. That there were hyper-conservative uberskeptics that didn’t think so (and hadn’t actually been following such approaches in detail) and snootily spoke in the press about that doesn’t change what the real experts who were keeping abreast to the latest developments thought.
Also the instrumental parameters from manufacturer A probably cannot be applied directly to the instrument from manufacturer B. It is an entire process/system that can not be reproduced overnight. It takes time.
https://www.precisionnanosystems.com/platform-technologies/p...
Here's a company which makes the "chips" which go in such cartridges.[1] And here are some chips.[2] Making those involves etching tiny patterns in glass, lining the channels with various coatings, and assembling the layers of glass into devices. All this has to be done in a very clean environment. Note the similarity to the processes in a wafer fab.
The point here is that the semiconductor industry has many processes and tools which might be helpful if there's a need to manufacture microfluidic components in quantity.
[1] https://www.dolomite-microfluidics.com/
[2] https://www.dolomite-microfluidics.com/product-category/micr...