Cyrus Poonawalla on Deep-Tech Bets

Adar Poonawalla told NPR he decided to invest tens of millions of dollars in glass vials alone and to produce four different COVID-19 vaccines — including the Oxford-AstraZeneca one — before any clinical trials proved them effective. If the vaccines worked, Serum would have hundreds of millions of doses stockpiled; if they failed, Serum would have useless vaccines and hundreds of millions of dollars in losses.

Inside Serum's sprawling Pune factory, NPR describes filled vaccine vials whizzing off conveyor belts at around 5,000 per minute. Scientists in goggles and gloves steered microscopes over a chimpanzee virus spiked with coronavirus protein. Human embryonic kidney cells fermented in floor-to-ceiling stainless steel vats imported from Europe that cost upward of $4 million each.

The manufacturing partnership with Oxford-AstraZeneca began, NPR explains, when a tiny 1-milliliter vial arrived by courier from Oxford in May 2020 containing the components of a viral vector vaccine. Oxford supplied a weakened adenovirus that causes the common cold in chimpanzees, into which they had inserted a coronavirus protein; they also supplied cell substrate to grow the vaccine, plus technology transfer from AstraZeneca.