BioNTech to produce trial cancer vaccine in Jerusalem

• Published date: 22 March 2023

BioNTech has signed an agreement with the Jerusalem municipality, the Foreign Trade Administration in the Ministry of the Economy, and the Jerusalem Development Authority. Itzik Ozer, director of business development at the Jerusalem Development Authority says, "The plant will employ between 200 and 300 people, and it will be built within two to three years on 28 dunams of land already allocated for the project."

Cancer vaccination nears clinical trial

The project is still at an early stage, the company says, and it is not yet known how much will be invested in the facility. Investment in projects like this one can amount to tends of millions of dollars.

BioNTech can easily afford to invest sums like this. Its revenue is expected to decline in 2023 in line with the decline in the use of Covid-19 vaccinations, but it has plenty of cash for the next phase: €13.4 billion at the end of the third quarter of 2022. As far as state support is concerned, BioNTech will be entitled to the benefits given to companies setting up biomedical or high-tech factories in Jerusalem, but probably not more than that.

Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, Israel has been looking for someone who will set up a vaccines production facility in Israel that can be rapidly converted to production of emergency vaccines in the event of another pandemic. The arrival in Israel of BioNTech, one of the...