Dr. Natasha Kathuria discusses the distribution and effectiveness of the coronavirus vaccine while Novavax reports the test results.
Global pharmaceutical company Novartis announced on Friday that it had signed an advance agreement to increase the manufacturing capacity of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine.
The company plans to take mRNA ingredients from BioNTech, load them in bottles in Stein, Switzerland, and send them back to BioNTech for global distribution, according to a company announcement.
The works will start in the second quarter of 2021, depending on the final agreements.
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“Novartis has been mobilizing on several fronts to support the response to the global pandemic,” said Steffen Lang, head of technical operations at Novartis, in the press release published on Friday. “As a company that is reimagining medicine with advanced therapy platforms, we are committed to leveraging our manufacturing capabilities to help support the supply of COVID-19 vaccines and therapies worldwide. We hope that this will be the first in a series of agreements. “
Novartis said its manufacturing team is in late negotiations with several companies to help with manufacturing tasks like “mRNA production, therapeutic protein production [and] production of raw materials ”for vaccines and therapies against the new virus, which has claimed almost 2.2 million lives worldwide so far, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
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The two-dose COVID-19 vaccine from Pfizer-BioNTech continues to be launched worldwide and is responsible for more than 14 million vaccinations in the United States, while another 11.7 million Aemricans received a vaccine developed by Moderna, from according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).