US laboratory Moderna today announced its intention to invest in the manufacturing process to be able to produce three billion doses of the covid-19 vaccine by 2022.
The company that developed a vaccine based on RNA technology like Pfizer/BioNTech has upwardly revised expectations for 2021 and now says in a statement that it can supply between 800 million and 1 billion doses during 2021.
Specifically, Moderna highlights its intention to invest in the group’s facilities in Lonza, Switzerland, one of the pharmaceutical industry’s largest production sites.
As far as Moderna is concerned, a new finished products filling line had already been approved in March, in Rovi, Spain, which will be synchronized with the substance expansion process.
The amounts involved in the operations announced by the company were not disclosed.
“We see the virus spreading rapidly, we see that the virus is mutating, we are seeing new variants (…) We have to take the lead to be ready, if necessary, for a third dose,” Moderna’s director for Europe, Dan Staner, said today in an interview with Swiss public broadcaster RTS 1.
The investments will start to be implemented at the end of 2021 and early next year.
The Lonza plant, meanwhile, announced that it will install three additional production lines in Viège, in the Swiss canton of Valais, to double the production of substances for the manufacture of the Moderna vaccine.
Earlier this week, the French pharmaceutical company Sanofi, which is developing its own vaccine, announced that it plans to produce 200 million doses of Moderna’s covid-19 compound to meet requests from several countries.
To this end, Sanofi will involve the infrastructure it owns in the United States (New Jersey) in biotechnology starting in September
