100 days to save 8 million lives: how a new kind of personal manufacturing system is transforming global pandemic response
CEPI’s 100-day mission reframes pandemic preparedness around a single, uncompromising metric: speed at global scale. Modelling shows that if safe, effective vaccines can be developed, manufactured, and deployed within 100 days of an outbreak, more than eight million lives could be saved in a future pandemic. Achieving this goal, however, requires more than faster biology. It demands a fundamental shift in how vaccines are designed, manufactured and distributed worldwide.
Historically, vaccine development and manufacturing have been optimised for efficiency at scale, relying on centralised facilities, long technology-transfer cycles and late-stage process definition. While this model has delivered remarkable successes, it is structurally incompatible with a rapid, equitable pandemic response. The bottlenecks are now well understood: manufacturing risks that emerge too late, clinical processes that fail to translate to commercial reality and global supply chains that concentrate production capacity far from where vaccines are ultimately needed, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).
Regulatory experience consistently shows that failures in product quality and manufacturability dominate late-stage setbacks. These failures are not simply technical; they are systemic. Product quality cannot be tested into existence at the end of development—it is the emergent outcome of an entire manufacturing system. Biological attributes and process variables are deeply interdependent, propagating across unit operations and scales. Traditional development approaches, focused on individual steps rather than whole systems, obscure these interactions and delay critical learning until speed is no longer possible.
This presentation introduces personal manufacturing as the new category that can deliver the 100 day mission, enabled by a connected network of Factory Development Systems and decentralised Smart Manufacturing Systems.
Personal manufacturing is not only about going faster; it is about going everywhere. Personal manufacturing elevates development into a system-level, production-grade environment where manufacturability, control and scalability are engineered at source, not retrofitted later. Digital technology transfer between connected devices allows production processes to be distributed between devices.
By standardising manufacturing systems rather than individual facilities, this approach enables decentralised, high-quality vaccine production suitable for deployment in LMICs, reducing dependence on fragile global supply chains and shortening the path from outbreak to immunisation. Manufacturing design space, control strategies and quality evidence are generated once and deployed many times, supporting rapid replication across geographies.
These systems are “kept warm” by being used for normal, everyday biomanufacturing yet be scaled to provide “rapid burst capacity” in a high demand situations. Most of all, these systems are affordable and allow truly equitable access to partners around the world.
This briefing shows how personal manufacturing makes the 100-day mission achievable in practice: revealing hidden risks early, enabling rapid and confident scale-out and aligning speed, quality and equity into a single engineered system.
In doing so, personal manufacturing is transforming pandemic response from a heroic global scramble into a repeatable, distributed capability capable of saving millions of lives when time matters most.
