It doesn’t feel like much of a ballroom. There’s no marble floor or orchestra, no opulent drapery or free-flowing champagne. Instead of white tie, the dress code is hazmat suits.
But to the scientists and researchers working at this state-of-the-art, 30,000 square foot vaccine research centre in Singapore, that’s exactly what it is.
“You can waltz here, you can tango here – you are free to dance whichever dance that you actually prefer,” said Mabel Chan, her eyes conveying the smile that her face mask concealed.
“At least, that’s how we think of it. Like a traditional ballroom, it’s empty but can be reconfigured based on the dance routine – which, in this case, depends on which vaccine you’re making.”
Situated on the fourth floor of a nondescript building in southern Singapore, this laboratory is perhaps the world’s most biosecure ‘ballroom’. It has been built with flexibility in mind – even the polished metal bioreactors, set atop wheels, can be moved and reconfigured.
Why? So technicians can pivot rapidly from one vaccine technology or disease target to another – whether that’s research into a next-generation Ebola vaccine, or responding to a new pandemic threat.
Mabel Chan outside a drug substance suite at the ACES facility – Charlene Winfred
“We essentially made the whole process so flexible and configurable that, whatever we’re asked to manufacture, we’re able to modify our processes to fit that product,” said Lawrence Yap, one of the masterminds behind the facility and Ms Chan’s boss.
“This is a very modular and nimble design… but the idea is not quantum leaping,” he added. “We’ve really just gathered various ideas from the biological space, and applied it to vaccines.”
The innovative facility, called ACES, is at the forefront of the next stage in a unique partnership between the pharmaceutical giant Merck (MSD in Europe) and the British philanthropic powerhouse Wellcome.
Some 16 years ago, the two organisations decided to collaborate on unprofitable but deadly diseases like cholera, Ebola and rotavirus. But instead of co-funding research, they took the highly unusual decision to establish a joint venture, Hilleman Laboratories – named in honour of the prolific vaccinologist Dr Maurice Hilleman, who has been credited with developing more than 40 shots.
The idea was to create a vaccine research centre to bridge what has become known in the pharmaceutical world as the “valley of death” – the gap between an academic concept and a commercial product, which plagues the early stages of medical research – and drive forward immunisations specifically designed for low-income countries.
Now, the Telegraph can reveal that MSD and Wellcome are together committing a further £56 million over the next four years to the not-for-profit – which is expanding its portfolio to also tackle superbugs, having relocated from India to Singapore and established its own manufacturing hub. MSD’s investment in southeast Asia comes as the company scrapped a £1 billion expansion in Britain, warning the UK has undervalued innovative medicines.
“[Hilleman Laboratories] is a really unique model of how we can bring the industry and philanthropic funding together to deliver vaccines,” said Dr Alex Pym, director of infectious disease at Wellcome.
“The challenge for many infectious diseases is that there is no commercial market… and some pharmaceutical companies are actually pulling back from investing,” he said. “Yet, by some estimates, 40 per cent of Africans still die from an infectious disease. So we need to come up with new vaccines that can prevent these devastating diseases in those communities.”
A scientist at work in Hilleman’s headquarters and R&D lab – Charlene Winfred
In a bright white lab in the heart of Singapore’s Biopolis – the city-state’s sleek hub for biomedical research – Hilleman Laboratories’ scientists are working on these vaccine candidates. This is where the development stage unfolds, before the ACES facility three miles away manufactures the doses for phase one and two trials.
In the last three years, one major focus here has been Ebola – specifically, how to make the existing vaccine, called Ervebo and developed by MSD, better suited to the places it’s needed most.
The shot, which protects against the Zaire strain of the haemorrhagic fever, was first approved in 2019. Roughly half a million doses have since been stockpiled in Switzerland, ready to be deployed in an emergency.
But the vaccine has to be kept at ultra-cool temperatures of -70C and, once deployed, it can last only a fortnight in a fridge at between 2-8C. This presents a huge logistical challenge, as outbreaks often emerge in remote areas with limited infrastructure and patchy electricity.
That exact scenario is unfolding now. In early September, the Democratic Republic of Congo announced a new Ebola outbreak in Kasai province – at least 48 people have since contracted the virus, and 31 have so far died.
But while an initial vaccination campaign has been launched, it has been complicated by the super-freeze requirements. Dr Landry Kabego, a member of the World Health Organization (WHO) team deployed on the ground, said they had to fly generators to the nearest cargo airport – but it’s still a two day drive on bumpy roads to the treatment centre in Bulape.
“The commercially available vaccine needs two attributes to enhance its availability: one is [reduced] cost, and the second is thermostability,” said Dr Raman Rao, Hilleman Laboratories’ chief executive. “That’s what we’ve been working on – and it’s now at the stage where it’s been transferred to a commercial partner for scale up.”
The facility’s Ebola shot, which protects against the Zaire strain of the haemorrhagic fever, was first approved in 2019 – Jerome Delay/AP
In this case, the partner is a South Korean vaccine manufacturer called SK Bioscience, who are working to produce the updated shot at scale. Dr Rao hopes the new version of the Ebola vaccine will be “licensed by at least 2028”.
He added that this exemplifies Hilleman Laboratories’ approach of “de-risking” the vaccine development process, by themselves taking on the risk that a design may fail. Once a concept has successfully passed early clinical trials, they pass it to a manufacturing partner to take the candidate through phase three studies and regulatory approval.
“We play in the early valley of death – which sounds a bit ominous, but it basically refers to the majority of [new products] getting lost in pre-clinical trials,” said Dr Rao.
“Vaccine manufacturing is difficult, it’s challenging, it’s humongously expensive… [and] you lose assets in the proof of concept stage. We’re trying to surmount that valley, by bridging the gap from a design to a product, to de-risk the investments from manufacturing partners later.”
So far, the not-for-profit’s greatest success has been with cholera. The organisation has been working on the bacterial disease for more than a decade – now its candidate, Hillchol, is in the WHO pre-qualification process.
A child receives an oral cholera vaccine – Elisa Oddone
This will not be the first cholera immunisation, far from it; three oral vaccines are already approved by the WHO. Yet with climate change and conflict driving ever-larger outbreaks, the world is facing a severe supply shortage. In January 2024, the global vaccine stockpile ran completely dry – then it happened again in October.
Part of the problem is that the current immunisations are difficult to produce, making it incredibly hard to share the technology with more manufacturers to expand availability. Hilleman has attempted to solve the complexity problem by finding a way to include just one serotype in the vaccine.
“[Oral cholera vaccines] are currently a combination of multiple strains,” said Wellcome’s Dr Pym. “So this work was really focused on simplifying it to a single strain, so it’s easier to manufacture and, ultimately, easier to [achieve a] tech transfer. Hopefully that will also significantly lower the cost.
“You can see by the fact that there is this global shortage that we need innovation,” he added. “We’re optimistic that, once the [WHO approval process] is completed, it will have a significant impact on the global shortage, so we can do prevention [as well as outbreak response].”
This time, Hilleman Laboratories partnered with Bharat Biotech, an Indian pharmaceutical company, to manufacture Hillchol and push it through the final stages of development. Dr Rao hopes the vaccine will gain approval in 2026.
The £20 million facility aims to pivot rapidly from one vaccine technology or disease target to another – Charlene Winfred
The research organisation has several other projects on the books too – such as Lasse fever, a disease for which there are no vaccines. The non-profit also recently concluded a review to set its priorities over the coming four years, and determined their next targets will be bacteria.
But the move to Singapore and creation of ACES was also encouraged by a city-state on edge. During the pandemic, it became all too clear to the government that there was a gaping hole in their pandemic preparedness plans.
“Singapore was looking around the entire biomedical park asking which facility they can retrofit, to try and run a novel vaccine process or a monoclonal antibody process,” said Mr Yap, the global head of technical operations at Hilleman Laboratories. “But lo and behold, they couldn’t find anything.”
While the city is home to pharmaceutical companies with manufacturing facilities, they were all designed with a specific product in mind.
“The Singapore government, all credit to them, they tend to learn from history, they tend to learn from a setback,” said Mr Yap. “So they said, we have to have something that makes sense for us – if the next pandemic were to hit us, we cannot be left in the same situation again.”
This led to a partnership with Hilleman Laboratories to build the £20 million ACES facility.
In ‘peacetime’, the hub makes vaccine candidates to support the not-for-profit’s phase one and two clinical trials. But if a pandemic strikes, the facility – which also has capacity to ‘fill and finish’ doses in glass vials – can rapidly pivot to develop or manufacture an immunisation to protect Singapore’s six million residents.
“So just imagine, if you are given this kind of mandate, how would you design a plant like it?” said Mr Yap. “But I began to work in the vaccine space after spending quite a bit of time in the biologic space, and I realised the vaccine space is typically a lot more conservative.
“I’d liken our approach to the Apple iPhone – it was actually a plethora of different ideas from different companies, and Apple just happily accrued them, accumulated them, and made them into something that is completely novel. We did the same, and that resulted in this ballroom.”
Mr Yap gesticulated wildly as he guided the Telegraph through the facility – joking that there was nothing that could turn us into the “next spiderwoman” inside, as he pointed out the plant’s flexible features.
“So this is our ballroom,” he said, throwing open his arms to present the clinical space. “But don’t worry, I won’t make you dance the cha-cha.”
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