Livi plant making vaccine to take on 75 more staff
Another 75 people are due to be hired as mass production begins in West Lothian of a Covid- 19 vaccine – but it won’t be ready for at least another year.
Valneva in Livingston are working on the unique inactivated vaccine and have released more details on the timeframe of production.
Clinical trials involving approximately 150 healthy adults will be conducted in study sites across the United Kingdom, supported by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR).
Trials will then step up next year and will include more than 4000 participants, which it believes could support an initial regulatory approval as soon as the fourth quarter of 2021.
Currently there are 100 staff employed by the vaccine specialists at their Livingston plant but more are being recruited to cope with production of their Covid-19 vaccine candidate, VLA2001. The Courier has previously reported that the UK government has ordered 60 million doses of the vaccine.
Leader of West Lothian Council, Lawrence Fitzpatrick, said: “News of this milestone is most welcome and I wish them luck as the clinical trials progress.
“The 75 jobs created as a result of this vital work will provide an economic boost for the local area, adding to the strong life science, technology, engineering and manufacturing sector in West Lothian.”
Alok Sharma, UK Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, said: “As we take the monumental steps in rolling out the first
Covid-19 vaccine, we must remember that we need to have a range of vaccines available to protect the British public now and long into the future.
“Today, we have more welcome news that life-saving clinical trials will begin across the country to test the safety and effectiveness of Valneva’s vaccine, which is being clinically developed right here in the UK.
“Having visited Valneva’s state-ofthe art facility in the summer, I have seen first-hand the incredible work our scientists and researchers are doing to develop this vaccine.
“Thanks to significant investment from the UK government, we are doing all we can to ensure our country has the capabilities in place to produce hundreds of millions of doses of this vaccine for the UK and for those around the world.”
Thomas Lingelbach, chief executive officer of Valneva, said: “Our teams have been working extremely hard to develop our differentiated vaccine candidate and I would like to thank them, as well as the UK government, for their dedication and support.
“While conducting our first clinical trials, we are already ramping up our manufacturing capacities and commencing production at full-scale so that we can make the vaccine widely available across the world assuming the vaccine is safe and effective.”
Adam Finn, chief investigator for the VLA 2001-201 program and professor of paediatrics at the University of Bristol, said: “I’m very pleased and proud to be leading the clinical trials effort to bring this vaccine forward in the UK.
“The effort to produce vaccines to prevent Covid-19 and to limit its spread within populations has included several very new approaches, but there are tried and tested approaches to developing highly effective and safe vaccines that we can also use.
“Growing the whole virus and then inactivating it to make a vaccine is an approach first developed in the 1950s and has contributed to disease prevention over many decades.
“We expect this inactivated vaccine containing two adjuvants could generate a broader immune response.”
Our teams have been working very hard to develop our differentiated vaccine candidate