Moderna announces fill-finish deal with Catalent for COVID-19 vaccine

Moderna and Catalent have announced a collaboration for large-scale, commercial fill-finish manufacturing of Moderna’s mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine candidate.

Catalent will provide vial filling and packaging capacity, as well as additional staffing required for 24x7 manufacturing operations at its biologics facility in Bloomington, Indiana to support production of an initial 100 million doses of the vaccine candidate. The vaccines are intended to supply the U.S. market starting in the third quarter of 2020. The companies are in discussions to secure fill-finish capacity for continued production of hundreds of millions of additional doses.

The CDMO's state-of-the-art 875,000 square-foot biologics facility in Bloomington will undertake this vial filling work under barrier isolator technology. Moderna will leverage the site’s recent packaging expansion, which provides fully automated and high-speed packaging capabilities to accelerate manufacturing timelines.

Moderna was one of the five companies identified by the White House Operation Warp Speed program as having one of the most promising vaccine candidates. AstraZeneca, in collaboration with University of Oxford, was also on the list. A few weeks ago, the drugmaker announced an $87 million deal with Emergent BioSolutions to manufacture doses of the University of Oxford's adenovirus-based COVID-19 vaccine for U.S. supply.