Moderna has announced plans to increase its global manufacturing capacity for Covid-19 vaccine by making additional capital investments.
The investments will be made at the company’s owned and partnered manufacturing facilities and will increase global capacity for next year to approximately 1.4 billion doses at 100μg dose.
Enabling additional production of existing Moderna Covid-19 Vaccine, the investments will also allow the production of vaccine boosters which would be needed to address the emerging variants of SARS-CoV-2.
Moderna estimates that it would take about 12 months to make the additional production available.
Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel said: “We believe from our discussions with governments around the world that there will continue to be significant demand for our COVID-19 vaccine and we now are committed to materially increasing our manufacturing capacity.
“Because of the high efficacy of our COVID-19 vaccine and our ability to quickly develop variant vaccines to help boost the immune system of vaccinees, there is increased demand.
“We are investing in this additional capacity to help us increase production and allow for flexibility in manufacturing potential vaccine boosters to address emerging variants of the virus.”
The company is also set to increase base plan for this year to manufacture 700 million doses globally and is exploring other approaches to improve its throughput.
Moderna plans to potentially supply nearly one billion doses this year by optimising its operations.
It the company’s variant vaccine booster needs a less dose, such as 50μg, it could deliver more than two billion doses next year.
For this, Moderna plans to study a dose range of 50μg and lower for variant-based boosters and an additional booster of mRNA-1273. If this is successful, the company can supply more than 1.4 billion doses next year.