**Competing Interests:** No competing interests were disclosed.

**Reviewer Expertise:** Vaccine CMC/manufacturing development

I confirm that I have read this submission and believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard, however I have significant reservations, as outlined above.

Reviewer Report 08 November 2023

https://doi.org/10.5256/f1000research.154839.r218383

© 2023 Fecke W. This is an open access peer review report distributed under the terms of the [Creative Commons Attribution License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

<figure><img src="image_17.png" /></figure>

Wolfgang Fecke

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European Science Foundation, Strasbourg, Grand Est, France

This is a very interesting study for the development of a business plan for a vaccine research infrastructure which could become relevant also for other biomedical not-for-profit organizations. Some aspects are less well covered, in particular the area of competing with commercial CROs in the vaccine field. How many customers would find it more attractive to work with an academic not-for-profit rather than with a professional service provider remains unclear.

The KPIs listed in Table 2 rely mostly on unpublished data and are therefore not easy to use by others (hence my 'partly' answer in terms of data reproducibility) although some numbers are mentioned in Table 4. In that respect, the number of new patents appear fairly low (one every four years), given the number of projects (33) and incubated companies (15) within 10 years.

One minor point is a certain redundancy of information in Figures 1-4, these could be streamlined.

In the discussion the costs of running the infrastructure are mentioned in the sense that the service model cannot cover these costs. It would be helpful to have actual figures available on which this statement is based. What is the estimated income from the brokerage fees, and what are the personnel and other operational costs of the infrastructure? For instance, costs for general administrative or financial services through third parties could be obtained. Additional revenue stream of the infrastructure are possibly overheads derived from EC-funded projects - these are not taken into account at all although historical figures from the TRANSVAC projects exist.

Finally, the funding gap at least in the first years of the infrastructure could still be covered by membership contributions from countries although it is laudable that the authors attempt to design a fully sustainable model without public funding. Maybe it would be worth mentioning in the discussion that this option exists.

Overall, the article will be useful also for other biomedical infrastructures to support their business plans - as the authors mentioned in their discussion, another publicly available study which such
detailed numbers does not exist for an infrastructure or would be at least hard to find.

**Is the work clearly and accurately presented and does it cite the current literature?**

Yes

**Is the study design appropriate and is the work technically sound?**

Yes

**Are sufficient details of methods and analysis provided to allow replication by others?**

Yes

**If applicable, is the statistical analysis and its interpretation appropriate?**

Not applicable

**Are all the source data underlying the results available to ensure full reproducibility?**

Partly

**Are the conclusions drawn adequately supported by the results?**

Yes

**Competing Interests:** No competing interests were disclosed.

**Reviewer Expertise:** Research infrastructures, chemical biology, drug discovery

**I confirm that I have read this submission and believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard.**

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detailed numbers does not exist for an infrastructure or would be at least hard to find.

**Is the work clearly and accurately presented and does it cite the current literature?**

Yes

**Is the study design appropriate and is the work technically sound?**

Yes

**Are sufficient details of methods and analysis provided to allow replication by others?**

Yes

**If applicable, is the statistical analysis and its interpretation appropriate?**

Not applicable

**Are all the source data underlying the results available to ensure full reproducibility?**

Partly

**Are the conclusions drawn adequately supported by the results?**

Yes

**Competing Interests:** No competing interests were disclosed.

**Reviewer Expertise:** Research infrastructures, chemical biology, drug discovery

**I confirm that I have read this submission and believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard.**

The benefits of publishing with F1000Research:

* Your article is published within days, with no editorial bias

* You can publish traditional articles, null/negative results, case reports, data notes and more

* The peer review process is transparent and collaborative

* Your article is indexed in PubMed after passing peer review

* Dedicated customer support at every stage

For pre-submission enquiries, contact research@f1000.com