Senior members of three key regulatory and health bodies this week gave their assessments of the protection that existing COVID-19 vaccines may offer against future strains of the virus, and the requirements for developing and assessing modified vaccines.

Touchlight has secured £42m ($60m) in funding to support efforts to triple its manufacturing capacity of synthetic DNA based on the company’s proprietary dbDNA platform – an enzyme made minimal linear DNA vector. The completed facility will have the capacity to produce 1kg of GMP DNA per month, enough for one billion COVID-19 vaccine doses.

The European Commission has ordered more doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine to tackle COVID-19 “hotspots,” and has extended its export authorization scheme by three months. The EU’s procurement strategy has come under fire again, Lilly's antibodies have started a rolling review at the European Medicines Agency, and Sierra Leone has received its first coronavirus vaccines via the COVAX Facility.

A year after COVID-19 first turned the world upside down, executives across the biopharma industry consider what 2021 holds in store. The impact of the pandemic will have profound and long-lasting implications for a sector that has been at the heart of responding to the global health challenge.