The Vaccines Manufacturing and Innovation Centre (VMIC), which will be the UK’s first national vaccines manufacturing and innovation facility, has been awarded an additional £47.6m in grant funding.
This is intended to help support the further expansion and acceleration of the programme.
As part of VMIC’s responsibilities, it will help the UK respond quickly and effectively to pandemics both now and in the future, by providing the capacity to rapidly manufacture millions of doses of vaccines.
The new funding will support work already underway to:
- Expand the UK capacity for vaccine manufacturing twenty-fold, so that the UK has a highly-specialist manufacturing centre which, in a pandemic situation, is capable of making up to 70 million doses within a six-month period.
- Accelerate the timeline for VMIC to be operationally ready so that it can support the national response to the current Covid-19 pandemic.
To date, VMIC has been granted almost £215m in government funding.
This included in May 2020 an award of £93m additional grant funding to expand and fast track the project. This new award will further boost those efforts and assure the UK’s capability to deliver this highly-specialist facility despite ongoing challenges during the present pandemic.
The VMIC project was first announced back in 2018.
