I cannot speak specifically for J&J, but by the number of adenovirus licensing agreements I've seen for Oxford, Sputnik V, etc. I would guess that existing facilities can be converted to produce a viral-vector vaccine much easier than an mRNA vaccine. From there I would suspect that the scaling issues are mostly related to QA and repeated cycles of ensuring what you're producing is actually exactly what you intended to produce.
The technology is pretty standard. I can't imagine that there's any tech-driven bottleneck to development, but rather, issues surrounding licensing, IP transfer, liability, etc (in other words: legal concerns).
Once those are resolved, there's still a fixed amount of time that it takes to convert existing production facilities to some new purpose that you can't really eliminate (the old saying about 9 women having a baby in 1 month applies here...)
Basically, it's the sort of thing HN readers don't like to hear: the complexities of the real world create obstacles that are difficult to surmount with technology alone. If I had to guess, even if you got approval to have N partners manufacture the vaccine today, it would still take a few months to ramp those partners up to capacity.
Color me a little skeptical. This looks like a big GMP bioreactor facility. Once the vaccine is made, how does it get into vials? Fill and finish production lines are usually another massive complex. Are they going to transfer it offsite for packaging?
And this facility won't be finished until July 2021. Then the tech transfer has to happen, trial runs completed, everything validated. They might start actual production at the end of 2021.
Tech transfer of pharmaceutical processes is no joke. I've done it before.
The facility is already mostly complete, I live close to it. The schedule is for actual construction, certification, and qualification to be completed by July - thus for it to be ready for production.
I don't know if you've been there, but the facility is pretty massive. I don't think packaging will run into space concerns.
There's actually a vaccine plant right next to it, which is dwarfed by the NRC facility (of course not all of it is dedicated to vaccine production)
Not concerned about space, more expertise. Sterile fill and finish lines are incredibly expensive and complex. Plenty of big pharma manufacturers screw it up. It wouldn’t make any sense for the govt to invest in their own line. It would take them years to get it up and running. I assume they are outsourcing it.
