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Law360 (March 25, 2020, 3:09 PM EDT) -- Investment bank Jefferies Group LLC said Wednesday it's contributing $10 million and joining a federal public-private partnership to help quickly create hundreds of millions of prefilled syringes that could be used to help dispense a future coronavirus vaccine.
Jefferies said it was providing the seed capital to jumpstart the project, part of a larger effort to raise up to $1 billion in private capital as well as provide access to its client network and management team for use by the Rapid Aseptic Packaging of Injectable Drugs initiative.
RAPID was announced March 18 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The project also includes an award valued up to $456 million to public benefit corporation ApiJect Systems America to help research and further develop the prefilled syringe systems, HHS said at the time.
"We are ready to put the firm's capital to work in smart solutions, such as RAPID, that are critically needed to help America and the world win the battle against this pandemic," Jefferies CEO Rich Handler and President Brian Friedman said in the statement.
"We welcome [Jefferies] to the RAPID consortium as the latest private sector partner to join in this unprecedented fight against COVID-19 and to prepare the U.S. to respond rapidly in future public health emergencies," said Joe Hamel of HHS' Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response.
The syringes will be added to the nation's Strategic National Stockpile of drugs and medical supplies to be used for emergencies. The RAPID initiative involves building a domestic network of up to eight year-round packaging facilities with the capacity for population-scale surge that can create the specialty systems.
The syringes are created using a "blow-fill-seal" process with a plastic container holding a prefilled volume of medicine or vaccines, according to the statement.
The BFS system is already approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and used to dispense billions of doses annually for respiratory conditions, rotavirus vaccines and more, Jefferies said.
ApiJect CEO Jay Walker added that it's essential to be able to quickly package and dispense drugs at a population scale.
"Winning this battle against COVID-19 requires each and every company, citizen and all levels of government to step up," Walker said in the statement.
ApiJect creates a hardy, plastic, single-use dispenser designed to be cheaper than distributing medicine from glass vials, it said. ApiJect's dispensers are also meant to prevent the sharing of needles and transmission of diseases as a result, according to its website.
Jefferies and ApiJect did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
--Editing by Marygrace Murphy.
Update: This story has been updated with a response from HHS.
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