Moderna said it has teamed up with Catalent to make the Covid-19 vaccine that the biotech company is about to test in the country’s first large clinical trial.
Even though the vaccine’s large-scale safety and effectiveness has yet to be demonstrated, the urgency of the coronavirus pandemic is driving the companies to prepare production of 100 million doses by this year’s September quarter. In a press release, Moderna’s chief of technical operations Juan Andres said the production scale-up was proceeding with “unprecedented speed.”
“It has been wonderful to see both teams working together to support the common good,” he said.
In Thursday morning trading, Moderna stock (ticker: MRNA) was off 2% to $63.40, while shares of Catalent (CTLT) were up 3% to $72.55. Like many Americans, investors are showing anxiety about recent spikes in Covid cases.
Catalent will fill and finish vials of the Moderna vaccine, which contains strands of messenger-RNA genetic code that will instruct human cells to produce proteins similar to the spikes on a SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. That similarity will provoke users’ immune systems to crank out protective antibodies.
See our recent cover story on Covid vaccines:Inside the Science and Companies Racing to Develop a Covid-19 Vaccine
The deal is Catalent’s fourth contract-manufacturing arrangement with a Covid vaccine developer. It also has production plans with Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), AstraZeneca (AZN), and Arcturus Therapeutics (ARCT)—all of whom will have to conduct clinical trials before getting marketing approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Catalent came public in 2014. It is composed of businesses that Blackstone Group acquired seven years earlier from Cardinal Health.
As described in Congressional testimony this week by federal vaccine czar Anthony Fauci, drugmakers are speeding up the country’s Covid response by risking investments in manufacturing before drug trials are done. That way, a Covid vaccine might become available by early 2021—an unprecedented speed up for a vaccine-development process that previously took years. Even with the manufacturing shortcuts, Fauci and FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn vowed that safety reviews of the vaccines won’t be compromised.
Moderna’s mRNA vaccine candidate is one of several that are trying the mRNA technology against Covid. Others include a team comprising BioNTech (BNTX) and Pfizer (PFE), a team of Sanofi (SNY) and Translate Bio (TBIO), Arcturus, and a U.K. government-backed project at Imperial College School of Medicine.
Write to Bill Alpert at william.alpert@barrons.com
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June 25, 2020 at 10:43PM
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Moderna Is the Latest Coronavirus Vaccine Partner for Catalent - Barron's
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