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4 Therapeutics
Pages 17-22

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From page 17...
... REPURPOSED DRUGS New drugs need to go through extensive testing and take nearly a decade to get approval, said Walt. Therefore, the fastest way to help patients avoid severe disease is to screen the tens of thousands of drugs that have already been approved for effectiveness.
From page 18...
... VACCINES Soon after the covid-19 pandemic began, a massive global effort took shape to produce vaccines that would protect people from infection and disease. For example, observed Walt, the United States launched a multibillion-dollar program called Operation Warp Speed to produce large quantities of vaccine in record time -- "months rather than many years, as has been the standard since vaccines were first developed." Vaccines take time to develop and to demonstrate that they are effective and safe.
From page 19...
... However, Walt noted, vaccine production immediately encountered the same problem as did diagnostics: the amount of vaccine required exceeded the world's entire prepandemic vaccine manufacturing capacity. "It is an extraordinary engineering scale-up problem for both manufacturing and distribution," he said.
From page 20...
... In the United States, for example, AstraZeneca was working with the federal government, which would take delivery and decide how the vaccine should be distributed. "Fair and equitable access means that somebody has to make those calls." SCALING UP VACCINE PRODUCTION In his remarks during the forum, Paul McKenzie, chief operating officer ­ at the global biotechnology company CSL Limited, went into more detail on the challenge of meeting production demands during the pandemic.
From page 21...
... "A leveraged, collaborative environment across multiple industries is critical for our response in a pandemic," he said, particularly for rapid manufacturing scale-up and increased manufacturing resilience. Finally, McKenzie explained that distribution and supply chains "require different thinking from your normal manufacturing to be success­ul" in a pandemic.
From page 22...
... 22 ENGINEERING FOR PANDEMICS: PREPAREDNESS, RESPONSE, AND RECOVERY response to covid-19 depends on engineers, medical professionals, and scientists across industries, nonprofits, and governments to tackle new challenges and work together in new and collaborative ways."


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