Technoeconomic and life cycle assessment of an mRNA vaccine integrated manufacturing plant

In this study, a technoeconomic and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology was developed to identify the best compromises between costs and environmental performance of an integrated mRNA vaccine production plant. The plant-wide simulator was obtained and adopted from the literature which helped generate the technoeconomic data along with the life cycle inventories. The LCA was developed using SimaPro software based on the Ecoinvent database and ReCiPe 2016 method. A prediction tool based on artificial intelligence was used to estimate the environmental footprint of several raw materials. A base case scenario helped identify the environmental hotspots which laid the ground for a new set of scenarios to explore ways to lower the overall environmental footprint. Consequently, several recycles were implemented which helped reduce the endpoint categories by up to 10% while reducing the operating expenditures by 13%. The results gave key insights into the optimization of mRNA vaccine production and waste minimization.