German biotech company BioNTech has forecast a significant €9.8bn for sales of its Pfizer-partnered COVID-19 vaccine in 2021.
The estimate, revealed in BioNTech’s 2020 financial results, is based on the delivery of currently signed supply contracts for approximately 1.4 billion doses of the vaccine.
The company added that additional revenues related to further supply contracts for deliveries in 2021 are expected, meaning the current estimate could eventually be exceeded.
BioNTech also raised the full year manufacturing capacity target for the Pfizer-partnered COVID-19 vaccine from 2 billion doses to 2.5 billion doses, in a bid to ‘address increase demand’.
‘The increase is driven by the optimisation of production processes, the recent initiation of production at BioNTech’s Marburg, Germany facility, regulatory approval for six-dose vials and the expansion of our manufacturing and supplier network. Additional measures and discussions with potential partners to further expand the manufacturing capacity and network are ongoing,’ the company said in a statement.
Elsewhere in its full-year results, BioNTech said that its total revenues jumped to an estimated €482.3m in 2020, compared to €108.6m for the same period in 2019.
“2020 was a transformational year for BioNTech with the development and approval of the first mRNA drug in history. As of March 2021, we had delivered more than 200 million doses of our vaccine to more than 65 countries and regions together with our partners, and we are already seeing the first signs of vaccine-associated reduction of COVID-19 cases and mortality in multiple countries,” said Ugur Sahin, co-founder and chief executive officer of BioNTech.
“We will continue to focus on innovating in the COVID-19 field by advancing new formulations and addressing vaccine variants, as well as initiating new trials in additional sub-populations,” he added.
Pfizer and BioNTech are working on modified versions of their COVID-19 vaccine to address new variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
BioNTech also announced that the US Food and Drug Administration approved an additional amendment to the study protocol of a global phase 1/2/3 clinical study to evaluate an additional dose of its COVID-19 vaccine or a variant-specific vaccine, using a new construction based on the B.1.351 variant discovered in South Africa.
The companies also recently initiated a study to evaluate the safety and immunogenicity of a third dose of their COVID-19 vaccine to combat newly emerging variants of the virus.