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Source: Bloomberg
By Naomi Kresge
- Company has made first batch of main ingredient in Covid shot
- Ramping up production on vaccine could last into 2021
Most of the production of the drug substance for Moderna’s vaccine is running via Lonza, a Swiss company with a long history of partnering with big drugmakers. Lonza is building out capacity for 400 million doses a year — 300 million from three production lines in Visp, Switzerland, and 100 million in New Hampshire. Moderna itself has one production line with capacity for 100 million doses a year.
Moderna has said it will be able to deliver 20 million doses of vaccine by the end of this year, enough to inoculate 10 million people. The U.S. will get the first batch.
Moderna’s vaccine is a new type of medicine, like the one from Pfizer and its partner, BioNTech SE. Based on messenger RNA, it essentially transforms the cells of the body into tiny vaccine-making machines. That new technology means that Lonza had to create its production lines “from scratch,” Baehny said. The Swiss company has a 10-year exclusive collaboration deal to produce mRNA products for Moderna.
Categories: The Muslim Times, Vaccine
The study of 560 healthy adults, including 240 over the age of 70-years-old, found the vaccine to be safe and produced a similar immune response among people aged over 56-years-old and those aged between 18 and 55.
British pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca, which is working in collaboration with the University of Oxford, has previously said interim data showed their experimental vaccine had produced an immune response in older and younger adults.
The authors of the Oxford study said their results could be encouraging if the immune responses are found to be associated with protection against Covid-19 infection.
The phase two trial did not assess vaccine efficacy, however, and phase three trials are ongoing to confirm this.
The promising early-stage results were published in The Lancet, one of the world’s top medical journals, on Thursday.
The study of 560 healthy adults, including 240 over the age of 70-years-old, found the vaccine to be safe and produced a similar immune response among people aged over 56-years-old and those aged between 18 and 55.
Older people face a “significant risk” of developing severe illness on contracting Covid-19, the WHO has said, citing decreased immune function and potential underlying health conditions. People of all ages are at risk of contracting the virus, however.
British pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca, which is working in collaboration with the University of Oxford, has previously said interim data showed their experimental vaccine had produced an immune response in older and younger adults.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/oxford-covid-vaccine-prompts-immune-response-among-all-adults-study.html