Spain's Rovi to make ingredients for Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine

MADRID (Reuters) -Spanish pharmaceuticals company Rovi announced on Monday that it will start making the active ingredients for Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine.

Rovi will have capacity to supply the active agents for up to 100 million vaccine doses a year at its plant in Granada via a new production line.

This would be the first European drug ingredients production site for Moderna outside of Switzerland, where Lonza has one large commercial production line now manufacturing drug substances and another two commercial lines nearing completion.

Similar to Rovi, Lonza’s production lines are each designed to produce about 100 million doses a year. Lonza’s Swiss output has previously been shipped either to Rovi for fill and finish or to a facility belonging to Recipharm in France.

The ingredients are for vaccines bound for Europe, Canada, South Korea, Japan and elsewhere outside the United States.

“This investment consists of the installation of a new line supporting production phases of the active substance of the mRNA vaccine,” Rovi said, adding that it expects to begin supplying markets other than the United States in the third quarter of this year.

Rovi did not disclose the size of its investment in the new production line.

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