In the

pharmaceutical industry The pharmaceutical industry discovers, develops, produces, and markets drugs or pharmaceutical drugs for use as medications to be administered to patients (or self-administered), with the aim to cure them, vaccinate them, or alleviate symptoms. ...

, fill and finish (also referred to as fill finish, fill-finish or fill/finish) is the process of filling

vial A vial (also known as a phial or flacon) is a small glass or plastic vessel or bottle, often used to store medication as liquids, powders or capsules. They can also be used as scientific sample vessels; for instance, in autosampler devices i ...

s with

vaccine A vaccine is a biological Dosage form, preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious disease, infectious or cancer, malignant disease. The safety and effectiveness of vaccines has been widely studied and verifie ...

, biological and pharmaceutical Drug Substances (DS) and finishing the process of packaging the medicine for distribution. Many vaccine manufacturers use third parties to fill and finish their vaccines. The fill/finish process is a common bottleneck in the manufacturing and deployment of vaccines. To address this problem, in 2013 the U.S. federal government created the Fill Finish Manufacturing Network, a network of third-party provider contracts intended to perform fill and finish operations for vaccines against future infectious diseases. As part of its response to the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identif ...

, the UK government has provided financial support for fill and finish operations.

References

Vaccination Manufacturing Pharmaceutical industry Packaging {{vaccine-stub