Moderna in final talks to build an mRNA manufacturing and R&D hub in the UK — report
Moderna is reportedly getting ready to take a big step directly into the European arena.
The big biotech, propelled by tens of billions of dollars in sales for its Covid-19 mRNA vaccine, is putting the finishing touches to an agreement with the UK government to build out new R&D and manufacturing facilities in the Golden Triangle — ground zero for the country’s biopharma and scientific complex.
The news was broken by the Financial Times, which also picked up this tweet from Health Secretary Sajid Javid after his meeting with Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel at the company’s Boston headquarters — where the CEO is fond of showing off their research and manufacturing ops.
Fantastic to meet with the team at @Moderna_tx, including Stéphane Bancel, in Boston.
The UK is ideally placed to become a life sciences superpower, and collaboration with world leading companies is crucial to this.
🇬🇧🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/hVRQayqaxJ
— Sajid Javid (@sajidjavid) February 10, 2022
Moderna has been moving one step behind the Pfizer/BioNTech alliance, fielding a massive market success with its vaccine and building up a global manufacturing network with Lonza and others to begin to address global demand. They’ve been working up supply agreements in Canada and Australia on global production, with a rough blueprint for Africa. But Moderna has reserved the vast majority of its vaccine supply for the countries that could afford it, leaving emerging countries out of the mix. And that has sparked a clamor to address the pandemic outside affluent countries, where vaccination rates are far lower.
The UK, meanwhile, has been anxious to offer its support to the big biopharma players as it looks to carve out a special place for the Golden Triangle in a post-Brexit world. And that could be a special enticement for Moderna, which relied on significant help from the US government to get their vaccine out early.
On the manufacturing side, that support could include direct subsidies. In R&D, one of the UK’s big attractions is access to its massive patient database, which offers some key attractions to drug and vaccine developers, and a scientific community second to none.
