Biotech company Moderna announced Tuesday that they had entered into an agreement with Thermo Fisher Scientific to fill/finish the sterile manufacturing and packaging of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine.
Under the agreement, Thermo Fishers’ facility in Greenville, N.C., will be used for aseptic fill/finish, labeling, and packaging hundreds of millions of doses of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, starting in the third quarter of 2021.
“Thermo Fisher has been a critical partner in supplying raw materials for our COVID-19 vaccine, and we are now pleased to further expand our relationship as an important manufacturing partner as well,” said Juan Andres, Moderna’s Chief Technical Operations and Quality Officer. “The addition of Thermo Fisher to our network will support our efforts to scale up our manufacturing ability.”
According to Bloomberg, more than 2 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines, including the Moderna vaccine, have been administered globally. Currently, the United States is vaccinating Americans at a rate of 956,705 doses per day, on average, putting the country on pace to cover 75 percent of the population within another six months.
Moderna has been named a top biopharmaceutical employer by Science magazine for the past six years and is currently in the process of developing 24 programs in a number of therapeutic areas, with 14 programs having entered the clinical phase. The company’s mRNA science has allowed for the development of therapeutics and vaccines for infectious diseases, immune-oncology, rare diseases, cardiovascular diseases, and auto-immune diseases.