Dessau's enhanced clout as pivotal vaccine producer

The town of Dessau in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt isn't that well known within Germany, let alone abroad. It may ring a bell, though, with global fans of functional design as the place is inseparably linked with Bauhaus architecture.

Dessau has recently been moving into public focus for something completely different though. While Germany has faced huge difficulties in establishing a coherent national vaccine rollout strategy, places like Dessau — and one company there in particular — has been at the center of reports painting a bright future for the whole of Saxony-Anhalt as a critical European hub for the far more complex business of vaccine production.

Dessau is home to IDT Biologika, a company "dedicated to contract development and manufacturing of viral vaccines, viral vectors and biologics," as it says on its website. Its history goes back 100 years, to the Bacteriological Institute founded in Dessau in 1921. Research and production focus shifted many times at the site through the decades. In East Germany, for instance, it concentrated on programs to treat infectious diseases in animals, among other things. From 2019, though, IDT Biologika has specialized in the custom development and manufacturing of human vaccines and biologics.

Deal with AstraZeneca

What's certain to give the enterprise a huge boost now is an agreement in February with the British-Swedish firm AstraZeneca, which seeks to speed up production of its COVID-19 vaccine in the second quarter to support EU needs with the help of IDT.

Both firms will make massive investments to increase Dessau's capacity, with the aim of eventually being able to produce millions of doses monthly by the end of 2022. This would see IDT Biologika secure some of the largest vaccine production capacities across Europe.

"We're planning an expansion of the whole manufacturing chain," IDT chief executive Jürgen Betzing told DW. "That includes the production of the vaccine itself, but also bottling it up in vials right to the optical control of the vials and the packaging. We can do all of this here in one place, saving our customers long transport routes."

Part of the €100 million ($119 million) investment that AstraZeneca and IDT are eyeing in Dessau will go into developing five 2,000-liter (530-gallon) bioreactors to crank up production. The deal could also allow for the manufacturing of similar vector-based vaccines from other pharmaceutical companies.

"Following German reunification [in 1990], IDT Biologika has gradually turned into Dessau's biggest employer as a result of its constant investment and innovation drive," Marcel Graul from Dessau's municipal Office for Business Development told DW. "And, mind you, the Treuhand trust [tasked with privatizing East German assets after unification] had originally declared the predecessor firm could not be restructured to become compatible and profitable."

Sputnik V, too?

In February, the German public broadcaster MDR reported about a possible deal between IDT and the developers of Russia's Sputnik V vaccine, a deal that Betzing did not comment on in his interview with DW. Saxony-Anhalt State Premier Reiner Haseloff told MDR  that "producing Sputnik V in Dessau could be interesting for IDT as it would open up the eastern European market for the company, right across to China."

Acting as a contract manufacturer is an important pillar of IDT's business strategy. On top of that, the company keeps alive its plan to market its own COVID vaccine.

"Work on our own COVID vaccine remains a fascinating job," Betzing said. He added that January's "phase 1 study results were mostly positive with regard to side effects — only the immune reaction parameters were below our expectations."

Betzing said the final trials for an optimized product would most likely start in the autumn.

Strolling across BioPharmaPark

If you want to catch a glimpse of Dessau's pharmaceutical and biotech activities, you need to see BioPharmaPark, a few miles away from the town center. It's huge, no less than 80 hectares (200 acres), with a good chunk of the area still available for prospective new tenants.

The major player in the park is IDT Biologika, with its focus on novel vaccines and biologicals. It inaugurated a new multifunctional vaccine production facility there in 2019. Also on the ground is Merz Pharma focusing on aesthetics, neurotoxins and dermal filters. Oncotech Pharma producing cytostatic drugs that inhibit cell proliferation and Octopharma Dessau with its products based on human plasma are also close by.

The cluster boasts an integrated infrastructure and service network that helps individual companies save costs and profit from synergy effects and access to global markets.

"Investments in BioPharmaPark have had a positive impact on the labor market in Dessau in general," Graul said. "One job created in the park on average means another five jobs created in the services sector, benefiting craftspeople, cleaning services, landscape maintenance firms and others."

Though many Germans have been surprised during the pandemic to find Dessau and Saxony-Anhalt making headlines for their vaccine research and production activities, Betzing said the know-how had always been here and local authorities have facilitated it.

"There's no lack of expertise here, also thanks to three universities that are all close by — Leipzig, Magdeburg and Halle," Betzing said, adding that the regional authorities' willingness to preserve and expand existing clusters had been helpful, too.

German government thinks big

There's no doubt that life science companies such as IDT, with another German site in Magdeburg, plus Dermapharm's Brehna facility, which produces BioNTech-Pfizer's vaccine, have become central to the government's strategy for turning Germany into Europe's main hub for vaccine production.

Media reports have spoken of plans to produce up to 2 billion doses annually. Whether the figure is true or not, future production is no doubt meant to exceed domestic needs by far, meaning that Germany will once again stay true to itself as an export nation.

Betzing said he believed that work on viral immunotherapies and corresponding vaccines would have a bright future — and so would his company.

"After all, there are not so many firms in Germany and elsewhere that are big enough to accelerate this development," Betzing said, "so I think we definitely took the right decision some two years ago when we started focusing solely on exactly that."