Emergent BioSolutions signs manufacturing agreement with J&J on COVID-19 vaccine candidate

Emergent BioSolutions Inc. struck a five-year manufacturing services agreement with Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen Pharmaceuticals Inc. for its investigational COVID-19 vaccine.

Emergent will provide contract development and manufacturing (CDMO) services for large-scale drug substance manufacturing over five years, valued at approximately $480 million for the first two years.

“Over the next five years, we are committing our leading CDMO services to advance this important vaccine candidate,” Syed Husain, senior vice president and CDMO business unit head at Emergent, said. “We have the expertise and capabilities to meet the long-term needs of our customers and provide ongoing commercial manufacturing to benefit patients.”
Under the agreement, Emergent will begin providing large-scale drug substance manufacturing for Johnson & Johnson’s adenovirus-based COVID-19 vaccine in 2021. For the subsequent years beginning in 2023, Emergent will provide a flexible capacity deployment model to support additional drug substance batches annually.

The manufacturing agreement follows and the contract announced in April for drug substance manufacturing technology transfer services and for reserving certain large-scale manufacturing capacity to pave the way for commercial drug substance manufacturing for the COVID-19 vaccine candidate, Emergent said.

“We are proud to deploy our manufacturing strength to address the COVID-19 pandemic,” Robert Kramer Sr., president and chief executive officer of Emergent BioSolutions, said. “Advancing this collaboration is one of the ways we live our mission – to protect and enhance life.”
The activities will be performed at Emergent’s Baltimore Bayview facility, a designated Center for Innovation in Advanced Development and Manufacturing (CIADM) by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). It is designed for rapid manufacturing of large quantities of vaccines and treatments during public health emergencies.

Emergent’s Bayview facility has unique capabilities to produce at clinical scale to get candidates rapidly into the clinic. The CIADM has the capacity to produce tens to hundreds of millions of doses of vaccine on an annual basis, based upon the platform technology being used.