Lonza is confident that the US and Swiss plants it is building to help make Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine a vaccine candidate will be ready for commercial production this year, executives at the Swiss company said Tuesday.
New production lines at Lonza’s Portsmouth, New Hampshire site aim to start manufacturing vaccine ingredients in November, while three lines at Visp, deep in a valley in the Swiss Alps, to supply 300 million vaccine doses per year, should begin delivery in December.
There is no approved Covid-19 vaccine yet, but several are in advanced trials, including those by Pfizer Inc, Johnson & Johnson and Moderna, whose candidate is based on a previously never approved technology that recruits human cells to help trigger a response. immune.
Torsten Schmidt, who runs Lonza’s Visp facility, where Moderna’s $ 210 million production lines are 50% complete, said he has secured the necessary equipment to avoid last minute setbacks.
“The delivery of the team was fundamental,” Schmidt said in an interview. “Normally you wait 12 months, you are talking here for 4 to 5 months. Ultimately, the CEO has been talking to the CEOs of the vendors to get the equipment delivered to them. “
Lonza, whose shares are up 60% this year, has a 10-year contract to supply Moderna with ingredients, including up to 1 billion annual doses of the Covid-19 vaccine.
The ingredients include a synthetic version of messenger RNA (mRNA), genetic material, which is packaged inside tiny fat droplets called nanolipids, to instruct human cells to produce a non-replicating form of the coronavirus spike protein and trigger a immune response in the body. .
They will be frozen at -70 degrees Celsius and then shipped from Visp to Laboratorios Farmacéuticos Rovi SA in Spain for “filling and finishing”, the final manufacturing stage.
STILL HIRING
Lonza is still hiring some of the roughly 200 workers it needs to operate the Moderna production lines in Visp, located where the Alps slope towards the nearby ski towns of Zermatt, near the famous Matterhorn and Saas Fe.
In total, Lonza expects to have about 4,000 workers at Visp in January, up from 3,500 today, following a wave of hires driven by drug manufacturing for other clients as well as Moderna. Among them are Roche, Sanofi and Humanigen of California, with whom it has partnered on another Covid-19 project.
As well-prepared as Lonza is, when Moderna’s vaccine becomes available depends on its assays and regulators. The American company has said that around 20 million doses should be ready by the end of the year.
Lonza’s drug unit revenue has already seen double-digit percentage increases, prompting the Basel-based company earlier this year to seek to divest its $ 1.8 billion-a-year specialty chemicals business. , after the sale of stagnant products, such as feed supplements and resins.
Talks with potential buyers are ongoing, said Renzo Cicillini, head of Lonza’s Visp site.
‘A LITTLE PROUD’
In Visp, a two-hour train ride from Zurich and Milan, Italy, its roughly 8,000 residents are used to Lonza taking a behind-the-scenes role in making drugs for well-known companies, said the city’s mayor, Niklaus Furger.
But the Covid-19 pandemic, which has killed more than 1 million people and wreaked havoc on the global economy, has left the people of Visp hoping for a success that puts it on the map.
“The idea that a vaccine could be produced in Visp with which we can fight the pandemic would be excellent,” Furger told Reuters at Visp town hall. “By the way, the world’s attention would be on Visp along with Lonza, something that would certainly make us all proud.”
.
