One of the big con­tract part­ners in the Covid-19 ef­fort, Catal­ent has signed deals with most of the ma­jor vac­cine play­ers to help ramp up sup­ply. Now, the New Jer­sey firm will ex­pand its deal with Mod­er­na in hopes of churn­ing out dou­ble the amount of fin­ished vials in time for sum­mer.

The CD­MO will in­crease its pro­duc­tion ca­pac­i­ty of the vac­cine in its Bloom­ing­ton, IN bi­o­log­ics fa­cil­i­ty through its new high-speed vial fill­ing line, Catal­ent an­nounced Tues­day. Sources close to the mat­ter told The Wall Street Jour­nal that agree­ment will in­crease the vac­cine out­put in April to 400 vials a minute.

New dos­es will be ready for ship­ment in May, and the plant’s up­grades will al­low for an ad­di­tion­al 80 mil­lion vials a year, the WSJ re­port­ed. This will help with Pres­i­dent Joe Biden’s push to pro­vide enough shots to vac­ci­nate every Amer­i­can adult by late May, and comes at a cru­cial time as talks of ex­pand­ing vac­cine avail­abil­i­ty to chil­dren have tak­en shape in re­cent weeks.

The ex­pand­ed deal fol­lows a March 17 an­nounce­ment that Catal­ent would sig­nif­i­cant­ly in­crease its man­u­fac­tur­ing ca­pac­i­ty for com­mer­cial sup­ply of the J&J vac­cine in Anag­ni, Italy, through late 2022.

Mod­er­na will now have a ded­i­cat­ed fill­ing line at Catal­ent’s In­di­ana fa­cil­i­ty through 2023, where, for now, it will man­u­fac­ture the Covid-19 vac­cine. On March 29, Mod­er­na an­nounced that it had pro­duced its 100 mil­lionth dose of that vac­cine.

Juan An­dres

Catal­ent an­nounced in Sep­tem­ber that it would spend $50 mil­lion to ex­pand the Bloom­ing­ton fa­cil­i­ty. The project, which the com­pa­ny said nor­mal­ly takes around 18 months to com­plete, was fin­ished in 10.

“We ap­pre­ci­ate this ex­pand­ed col­lab­o­ra­tion with Catal­ent and the ded­i­ca­tion of their team,” Mod­er­na CTO Juan An­dres said in a state­ment. “This ad­di­tion­al fill-fin­ish ca­pac­i­ty will be im­por­tant for not on­ly our COVID-19 vac­cine, but al­so po­ten­tial­ly for oth­er pro­grams in our clin­i­cal de­vel­op­ment pipeline.”

Catal­ent’s fa­cil­i­ty in Italy made head­lines at the end of March, when Ital­ian po­lice of­fi­cers raid­ed its Anag­ni plant amidst com­plaints that As­traZeneca was stock­pil­ing dos­es of its vac­cine. That vac­cine was made out­side of the EU and brought to An­gani to be filled in­to vials, a state­ment from As­traZeneca said, and it was “in­cor­rect to de­scribe this as a stock­pile.”

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As co-director of an experimental cellular therapy process development and manufacturing group at UCSF specializing in T cell therapies for autoimmune conditions, Jonathan Esensten has learned a lot about the challenges involved when his group hand-fashions a cell therapy. Esensten — who was a postdoc in Wendell Lim’s lab and counts the legendary Jeffrey Bluestone as a mentor — gives them all high marks at being great at what they do, but time and again there are variations in the treatments they construct.

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Amylyx is one of several companies looking to break through in the tough ALS field, and Wednesday they announced they’re moving forward with regulatory plans.

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