The Mainz-based biotech, which gained international attention with the Covid-19 vaccine Comirnaty it developed together with Pfizer, said in May this year it would set up a Southeast Asia headquarters in Singapore and build a production facility for mRNA vaccines and other drugs to treat infectious diseases and cancer.

BioNTech’s first regional clinical trial sites for novel cancer immunotherapies in Taiwan will initially evaluate the candidates for head and neck cancer. BNT113 is expected to be the first of what it said would be “a potential wave of novel cancer immunotherapies.”

To move the plans forward, the German firm has been collaborating with Taiwan’s YongLin Healthcare Foundation and last month signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Retain Biotech. This Taiwanese organization sponsored by the YongLin Healthcare Foundation is engaged in precision medicine, genomic medicine and cell therapy in oncology.

“Taiwan is one of the renowned biomedical hubs in the Asia-Pacific region, given its state-of-the-art health care system, medical research capacity and collaborative approach to work with leading companies and institutions around the world. Our Asia-Pacific strategy is based on powerful partnerships and a joint vision,” said Sean Marett, BioNTech’s chief business and chief commercial officer.

Retain will initially support clinical evaluation of BNT113 in a randomized Phase 2 trial with head and neck cancer. The seventh most common cancer globally sees a high incidence in the region. The candidate is based on BioNTech’s proprietary mRNA platform FixVac.
 

In addition to Taiwan, the company’s plans extend to evaluating the candidate in the broader Asia-Pacific region, including early trials in Australia’s Victoria state.

BioNTech and Retain will assess the potential to expand clinical activities to Japan, South Korea, Singapore and other East Asian regions to test drugs from BioNTech’s oncology pipeline, which currently encompasses 18 product candidates in 23 ongoing clinical trials.

In parallel, BioNTech has begun preparing for clinical and commercial-scale manufacturing in Asia. In November, it acquired a GMP-certified manufacturing facility in Singapore in support of its expansion plans there.

The overall goal is to expand drug production beyond mRNA into fields such as cell therapies. The Germany-based player, whose principals are Turkish-born, said it also intends to set up a clinical scale end-to-end mRNA manufacturing facility based on its BioNTainer solution in Melbourne, Australia, to promote research collaborations in Asia-Pacific.

BioNTech has already established subsidiaries in Singapore, Shanghai and Melbourne and recently registered a representative office in Taipei that would serve as regional innovation hub. The company said it expects to create “hundreds of jobs” across its new Asian sites and across multiple functions.

While BioNTech provided no figures for its planned multiple investment, the inventor of Comirnaty is likely to be flush with spare cash from sales of the world’s biggest-selling Covid vaccine.

Author: Dede Williams, Freelance Journalist