Digitalization: a faster pace for new vaccine development and manufacturing

11 May 2021 | Tuesday | News

With digital twins, it is now possible to collect data to understand exactly what is happening in real time during vaccine production, enabling optimization of operations. It allows not only monitoring of complex processes, but also predicts how changes would affect them.

In short, turning to digitalization helps speed things up at GSK. In collaboration with Siemens, the company aims to create and introduce digital twins of the entire vaccine manufacturing process for all new vaccines. In other words, the digital twins of the product, production, and performance, which will all be linked together. The next step on the digitalization journey in the framework of the current project: development of digital twins for the following part-processes.

Global healthcare company GSK is collaborating with digitalization expert Siemens and digital transformation leader ATOS to digitalize its vaccine development and production process. A key benefit will be much shorter development times for vaccines, allowing them to reach people faster and with the optimum quality. The digital twin plays a big role.

Right now, vaccine development typically progresses in many small silos, each digitalized to some extent in its own environment, but with few connections between them. This is where there is potential for optimization. Being able to consider the process as a whole and digitalizing the entire value chain would represent a significant improvement.

Digital twin: the virtual and real worlds in a closed loop

For this, Siemens offers an innovative portfolio of Digital Enterprise solutions – it covers product design, which is here developing the vaccine and making the active ingredient, otherwise referred to as primary processing, and manufacturing the pharmaceutical itself, or secondary processing. Siemens collaborated with GSK and ATOS to develop an innovative concept named digital twin, which combines the virtual and real worlds in a closed loop.

Digital twins allow data collection to understand exactly what is happening in real time during production. With that information, they can optimize operations

Focus on adjuvant technologies at GSK

As the first application to test the digital twin, GSK, Siemens and ATOS have developed a proof-of-concept digital twin specifically for the development and manufacturing of adjuvant technologies. Adjuvants are vaccine additives that boost the immune response. This can play an essential role to help protect people with weaker immune systems, such as older adults and immune-depressed people. Adjuvants also help reduce the volume of antigen required for each dose of vaccine, allowing the supply of more vaccine doses when demand is high.

"Getting vaccines faster to patients" - GSK, Siemens and ATOS digitalization collaboration (recording from Digital Enterprise Virtual Experience, April 2021)

Digitalization: a faster pace for new vaccine development and manufacturing

Digital twin: the virtual and real worlds in a closed loop

Focus on adjuvant technologies at GSK

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