Moderna up investments to produce 3 billion COVID vaccine doses in 2022
pharmafile | April 29, 2021 | News story | | COVID-19, Moderna, Vaccine, investment
Moderna have announced it is making new funding commitments to increase supply at its owned and partnered manufacturing facilities, which it expects will increase global 2022 capacity to up to 3 billion doses of its COVID-19 vaccine.
The company has said the planned investments will allow for a doubling of drug substance manufacturing at Lonza’s facility in Switzerland, a more than doubling of formulation, fill and finish, and drug substance manufacturing at Rovi’s site in Spain, and a 50% increase of drug substance at Moderna’s facilities in the US.
Moderna will begin making investments at its owned and partnered manufacturing facilities in 2021, with increased production from these investments expected to ramp up in late 2021 and early 2022.
Stéphane Bancel, Chief Executive Officer of Moderna, said: “As we follow the rapid spread of SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern, we believe that there will continue to be significant need for our mRNA COVID-19 vaccine and our variant booster candidates into 2022 and 2023.
“We are hearing from governments that there is no technology that provides the high efficacy of mRNA vaccines and the speed necessary to adapt to variants, while allowing reliable scalability of manufacturing.
“Today we have announced that our investments in Europe, including Spain, France and Belgium, Switzerland, and the US will allow us to deliver up to 3 billion doses in 2022, depending on the mix of product between primary series of vaccination and variant boosters.”
Today, the company also announced that it has raised its 2021 manufacturing supply forecast to between 800 million to 1 billion doses.
The Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine is an mRNA vaccine encoding for a prefusion stabilised form of the Spike (S) protein, which was co-developed by Moderna and investigators from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ (NIAID) Vaccine Research Center.
In a public statement, Moderna highlighted published studies predicting that waning immunity will impact vaccine efficacy within 12 months, and also pointed to studies showing variants of concern have lower starting neutralising antibody titers and may lead to breakthrough infections among those already infected or vaccinated.
The company also stated that it believes that mRNA is the best-positioned technology platform to meet the global need for ongoing vaccinations against COVID-19, based on the observations that mRNA vaccines have the highest published efficacy among authorised vaccines.
Moderna also announced today that ongoing development data related to the current formulation of its vaccine could support a three-month refrigerated shelf life in alternative formats to facilitate easier distribution to doctor’s offices and other smaller settings if authorised. Currently, the Moderna jab is only approved for storage up to one month at refrigerated temperatures and up to seven months in a standard freezer.
Kat Jenkins
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