- Even after the end of corona vaccine production, Moderna is sticking to its strategic partnership with the Swiss pharmaceutical supplier Lonza.
- The ten-year partnership was signed in 2020.
Moderna had the vaccine manufactured in Visp by Lonza for certain markets, including Switzerland, during the corona pandemic. Last Tuesday it was announced that production there would be stopped in the third quarter of 2023. “We will discuss possible collaborations as soon as our portfolio of messenger RNAs becomes more concrete,” said Moderna’s general director Stéphane Bancel in a published interview with “Le Temps”.
He said Moderna has “resized its industrial footprint and supply base to accelerate gross margin expansion toward its long-term target of 75 to 80 percent.” Demand for vaccines has fallen by 66 percent, said the head of the US company.
Competence center in Madrid
The company, based in Cambridge, near Boston, Massachusetts, plans to meet demand through its Norwood location over the next two years.
By 2025, Moderna plans to expand its capacity in new mRNA manufacturing facilities in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. The production partnership with Rovi in Spain will remain in place. “At the beginning of this year we opened a new competence center in Madrid,” said Bancel.
This center makes it possible to carry out analytical tests to certify batches of mRNA vaccines for markets outside the USA, he added: “This makes Spain the largest production center that covers all steps of the production chain of Moderna vaccines outside the USA.”