Researchers Omowamiwa Kolawole, Caroline B. Ncube, and Jeremy de Beer analyze whether technology transfer can be a path forward towards knowledge and vaccine transfers in their article entitled Challenges implementing technology transfer as a viable pathway for equitable vaccine production and access: A case study of the mRNA vaccine hub in South Africa. This paper examines the activities of the WHO-backed mRNA vaccine hub in South Africa, highlighting challenges and necessary factors in technology transfer. These challenges include skill gaps in manufacturing capacity, which necessitate technology transfer and open science.
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the inequitable distribution of vaccines and lack of open science. The WHO thus commissioned a vaccine manufacturing hub in South Africa to create an mRNA-based vaccine and engage in technology transfer to facilitate knowledge transfers with pharmaceutical companies in other countries. The paper situates these challenges in larger IP-related debates of open science, noting that IP can operate “as a tool for exclusionary access, whether justified or not.” This paper highlights that technology transfer fails without factors which can adequately support it.
The factors of sufficient institutional commitment, including adequate funding and an enabling legal and socio-economic environment are necessary for technology transfer to be effective, creating a “perfect storm of factors all at play, all at once.” Each of these require each other to be successful, highlighting the fact that multiple actors must band together to collaborate towards making this goal a reality. “This critical opportunity for LMICs to make necessary systemic change must not be wasted. The viability of tech transfer as shown in the context of the mRNA hub in South Africa, requires a willingness to fully commit and to properly engage.”
