The facility will bank on mRNA technology to produce vaccines for Malaria, COVID-19 and Tuberculosis.

It will be built on 30,000 square kilometers in Kigali Special Economic Zone. It will have two BioNTainers made up of assembled containers.

The six BioNTainers arrived in Kigali in the afternoon of Monday 13th March 2023.

They were received by government officials including the Minister of Health, Dr. Sabin Nsanzimana; Minister of Finance and Economic Planning, Dr. Uzziel Ndagijimana and the Director General of Rwanda Food and Drugs Authority (Rwanda FDA, Dr. Emile Bienvenu among others.

Also present at the event was Biopharmaceutical New Technologies (BioNTech) Chief Operating Officer, Dr. Sierk Poetting and diplomats accredited to Rwanda from Germany, France and the European Union.

Rwanda was the first African country to host such facility.

Minister Nsanzimana has said that reaching the milestone is a fruit of good leadership and developed partnership between Rwanda and other countries.

He explained that the project is relevant for the country to bring solutions expected to tackle emerging diseases.

Dr. Nsanzimana said that the vaccine manufacturing facility is expected to contribute to education and research where students will be capacitated to bring solutions in the area of vaccine manufacturing in Africa.

He expressed optimism that the partnership will help Africa to increase its contribution in scientific output from 2% to 10% globally.

Dr. Sierk Poetting said that the facility being set up in Rwanda will have the capacity to produce 50 million vaccine doses per year but the production will be based on demand.

BioNTech is a next generation immunotherapy company pioneering novel therapies for cancer and other serious diseases.

The company exploits a wide array of computational discovery and therapeutic drug platforms for the rapid development of novel biopharmaceuticals.

Its broad portfolio of oncology product candidates includes individualized and off-the-shelf mRNA-based therapies, innovative chimeric antigen receptor T cells, bi-specific checkpoint immuno-modulators, targeted cancer antibodies and small molecules.

Based on its deep expertise in mRNA vaccine development and in-house manufacturing capabilities, BioNTech and its collaborators are developing multiple mRNA vaccine candidates for a range of infectious diseases alongside its diverse oncology pipeline.

BioNTech has established a broad set of relationships with multiple global pharmaceutical collaborators, including Genmab, Sanofi, Genentech, a member of the Roche Group, Regeneron, Genevant, Fosun Pharma, and Pfizer.