Process Design and Modeling of Rabies Vaccine Production from Vero Cells

Rabies is a zoonotic disease with an extremely high fatality rate that is still a health problem in Thailand. Rabies vaccination is one of the efficient ways to control, prevent, and treat the disease; however, Thailand has insufficient vaccine production capacity to meet the demand. In general, the rabies vaccine was produced by infecting Vero cells grown in a serum-free medium under controlled conditions with the rabies virus. The objective of this study is to design the process and to simulate the production of rabies vaccine from Vero cell cultures under perfusion operation using SuperPro Designer, a technoeconomic modeling software. For the base case scenario using a 7-L bioreactor and perfusion operation, as expected, only about 900 doses of rabies vaccine per year are obtained from this model. When the production is scaled up to a 50-L bioreactor using the 7-L bioreactor as a seed bioreactor along with employing a staggered mode of operation (another set of the cell culture unit started to operate in between the cultivation of the other set), the production capacity of the rabies vaccine reaches the demand of 15 million doses per year. In this alternative case scenario, the annual revenue, the gross margin, and the payback time are 33.8 million USD, 37.93%, and 2.09 years, respectively.