Realistic Ambitions: Technology Transfer for Biologics Platform Technologies

This chapter argues that the recent international support for expanding vaccine production in African countries offers local policymakers and industrialists an opportunity that should be seized, to transition local manufacturing capabilities to produce biologics. Biologics offer a broader portfolio of cancer therapies. Biologics such as monoclonal antibodies represent an incremental innovation for vaccine manufacturers, with lower learning and transition costs than those that would be faced by manufacturers of chemical drugs seeking to move into biologics. However, biologics production in Africa is not only a technological project, it is also political and economic, feeding into geo-politics debates.