Abstract
Vaccines are typically produced in large facilities to take advantage of economies of scale. However disease outbreaks are often local in nature and require flexible, small-scale production, especially in regions with poor infrastructure. In this work, mobile on-demand vaccine production is explored as a solution to future outbreaks. An mRNA vaccine process is scaled down to the size of two 20-foot shipping containers, so that 10,000 vaccine doses can be produced in one batch in less than 16 hours. The container is self-sufficient except for the regular resupply of water and electricity being able to produce 100 batches without resupply raw materials and consumables. The final cost per dose is estimated to be 25 e with a likely range between 4 to 45 e depending on dose size, raw material prices, and other underlying assumptions. The practicality of a container-based facility at the presented scale is demonstrated by two case studies.