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Above, vials of the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine. The biotech currently only owns manufacturing facilities in the U.S.
Eugene Hoshiko / POOL/AFP via Getty Images
Moderna is discussing opening a messenger RNA manufacturing facility in the U.K., according to a report over the weekend.
Moderna (ticker: MRNA) is in late-stage talks with the U.K. government to build a manufacturing facility in the country and to run clinical trials with the National Health Service, according to the Financial Times. Last week, the health secretary, Sajid Javid, met with Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel in Boston.
Moderna didn’t comment in the FT story, and didn’t respond to a request for comment from Barron’s.
While Moderna (ticker: MRNA) has joined with contract manufacturers, including Europe’s
Lonza Group (LZAGY), the company currently owns manufacturing facilities only in the U.S.
Last year, it announced plans to open manufacturing plants in Australia and Canada, and at an unspecified location in Africa.
Moderna shares are down 36.5% this year, and 12.2% over the past 12 months. The stock was down 2.1% in premarket trading on Monday, after closing Friday at $161.32.
Barron’s wrote last month that Moderna faces a challenge as the vaccine market returns to normal after the Covid-19 pandemic wanes. Other vaccine makers, including
Sanofi (SNY) and
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), operate on a far larger scale than Moderna, with massive international footprints and enormous numbers of employees.
Moderna, despite the enormous revenues generated by its Covid-19 vaccine, remains a relative start-up. The company will need to use the war chest the vaccine generated to scale up quickly, Barron’s wrote, to remain competitive.
The company’s steady expansion of its global manufacturing footprint is part of that scale-up. At investor conferences in recent months, Bancel has said that his company intends to use the factories to make country-specific versions of the combination respiratory virus vaccine it says it is developing, which would offer protection against flu, Covid-19, and eventually other diseases.
“We’re literally building plants in those countries with multiyear contracts agreement for respiratory vaccines, where we can tweak the variant that the country cares about. It will be important for flu, for corona, for other things where we can literally talk to our one customer, the health minister, so OK, what do you want in a vaccine and which components you want and so on,” Bancel said at a healthcare conference held by Goldman Sachs in January.
In late January, the Food and Drug Administration approved Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine, just over a year after it first received its emergency-use authorization.
Write to Josh Nathan-Kazis at [email protected]
