Moderna taps Catalent to help with COVID-19 vaccine candidate

Pharma company Moderna will collaborate with Catalent – a company that develops technologies and manufacturing solutions for drugs and consumer health products – on Moderna’s mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine candidate.

Catalent will provide vial filling and packaging capacity, as well as additional staffing to support the production of an initial 100 million doses of Moderna’s vaccine candidate. The companies are in discussions to secure fill-finish capacity for continued production of hundreds of millions of additional doses.

“We appreciate this collaboration with Catalent and the flexibility of their team to deliver critical fill-finish capacity for mRNA-1273 at unprecedented speed,” Juan Andres, chief technical operations and quality officer at Moderna, said. “It has been wonderful to see both teams working together to support the common good.”

The vial filling work will be done at Catalent’s 875,000 square-foot biologics facility in Bloomington, Ind., under barrier isolator technology. The company has deep expertise in sterile formulation, with drug substance development and manufacturing and drug product fill-finish capacity across liquid and lyophilized vials, prefilled syringes, and cartridges, as well as primary and secondary packaging.

In addition, the Catalent Biologics network has facilities in Brussels, Belgium, and Anagni, Italy, that perform sterile drug product manufacturing and packaging.

“Catalent is proud to partner with Moderna in its work to address this critical public health need,” John Chiminski, chair and CEO of Catalent, said. “Catalent’s proven expertise in manufacturing scale-up and commercial production are well suited to support Moderna’s efforts to prepare for wide-scale supply of this vaccine candidate so that it is available if appropriate to address the pandemic.”