Moderna announces expansion of BARDA agreement to support larger phase 3 programme for Covid-19 vaccine

An earlier award from BARDA for up to $483 million was entered into to support the scale up of mRNA-1273 and clinical development, originally with a smaller anticipated number of participants in the Phase 3 clinical trial.

Following discussions with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and consultations with Operation Warp Speed over the past several months, the Company has decided to conduct a significantly larger Phase 3 clinical trial, leaving a gap in BARDA funding that will be closed by this contract modification. Under the terms of the revised contract, BARDA is expanding their support of the Company’s late stage clinical development of mRNA-1273, including the execution of a 30,000 participant Phase 3 study in the U.S. The total value of the award is now approximately $955 million.

“We thank BARDA for this continued commitment to mRNA-1273, our vaccine candidate against COVID-19.” said Stéphane Bancel, Moderna’s Chief Executive Officer. “Encouraged by the Phase 1 data, we believe that our mRNA vaccine may aid in addressing the COVID-19 pandemic and preventing future outbreaks.”

The Phase 3 COVE study is being conducted in collaboration with National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and is expected to begin tomorrow, July 27. The Phase 3 study protocol has been reviewed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and is aligned to recent FDA guidance on clinical trial design for COVID-19 vaccine studies.

The randomized, 1:1 placebo-controlled trial is expected to include approximately 30,000 participants at the 100 µg dose level in the U.S. The primary endpoint will be the prevention of symptomatic COVID-19 disease. Key secondary endpoints include prevention of severe COVID-19 disease (as defined by the need for hospitalization) and prevention of infection by SARS-CoV-2. The ClinicalTrials.gov identifier is NCT04470427.

Moderna is working closely with Operation Warp Speed and the NIH, including NIAID’s COVID-19 Prevention Trials Network (CoVPN), to conduct the Phase 3 COVE study. Working together with collaborators like NIH, the Company hopes to achieve a shared goal that the participants in the COVE study are representative of the communities at highest risk for COVID-19 and of our diverse society.

The Company remains on track to be able to deliver approximately 500 million doses per year, and possibly up to 1 billion doses per year, beginning in 2021 from the Company’s internal U.S. manufacturing site and strategic collaboration with Lonza. In addition, Moderna recently announced a collaboration with Catalent for large-scale, commercial fill-finish manufacturing of mRNA-1273 at Catalent’s biologics facility in Indiana. Initial funding of $1.3 billion for Moderna to begin producing mRNA-1273 supply at-risk was secured from investors in the Company’s most recent public equity offering in May 2020.

BARDA is part of the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. This project has been funded in whole or in part with Federal funds from the Department of Health and Human Services; Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response; Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, under Contract No. 75A50120C00034.

mRNA-1273 is an mRNA vaccine against COVID-19 encoding for a prefusion stabilized form of the Spike (S) protein, which was selected by Moderna in collaboration with investigators from the VRC. The first clinical batch, which was funded by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, was completed on February 7, 2020 and underwent analytical testing; it was shipped to NIH on February 24, 42 days from sequence selection.

The first participant in the NIAID-led Phase 1 study of mRNA-1273 was dosed on March 16, 63 days from sequence selection to Phase 1 study dosing. On May 12, the FDA granted mRNA-1273 Fast Track designation. Both cohorts, healthy adults ages 18-55 years (n=300) and older adults ages 55 years and above (n=300), in the Company’s Phase 2 study of mRNA-1273 are fully enrolled. A summary of the company’s work to date on COVID-19 can be found here.

Moderna scientists designed the company’s prophylactic vaccines modality to prevent infectious diseases. More than 1,900 participants have been enrolled in Moderna’s infectious disease vaccine clinical studies under health authorities in the U.S., Europe and Australia. Clinical data demonstrate that Moderna’s proprietary vaccine technology has been generally well-tolerated and can elicit durable immune responses to viral antigens. Based on clinical experience across Phase 1 studies, the company designated prophylactic vaccines a core modality and is working to accelerate the development of its vaccine pipeline.

The potential advantages of an mRNA approach to prophylactic vaccines include the ability to combine multiple mRNAs into a single vaccine, rapid discovery to respond to emerging pandemic threats and manufacturing agility derived from the platform nature of mRNA vaccine design and production. Moderna has built a fully integrated manufacturing plant which enables the promise of the technology platform.

Source: Company Press Release