The COVID-19 vaccine that was dreamed up and developed by Massachusetts-based Moderna will also be manufactured in the state.
"The vast majority of the U.S. production will be done in Massachusetts," Moderna co-founder Noubar Afeyan told GBH News. Afeyan is the founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering, a biotech venture capital firm that founded Moderna and more than 50 other life science and technology startups.
Moderna applied this week for emergency use authorization for its COVID-19 vaccine from the Food and Drug Administration. The vaccine is being manufactured at Moderna's own production facility in Norwood, Mass.
Moderna has also partnered with contract manufacturer Lonza, which is producing the vaccine at its facility in Portsmouth, N.H.
When the pandemic hit, Afeyan said, Moderna was able to move quickly to ramp up research and production.
"We were able to attract hundreds of people in the middle of a pandemic to join the company — beyond the people we already have — so we could ramp up production," Afeyan said. "I don't know where else you can do that. You might be able to do that in little pockets here and there. But Boston, Massachusetts is, I would argue, the only place where this could have been developed."
The biotechnological innovation behind Moderna's vaccine has been the company's focus for roughly a decade: programming messenger RNA to trigger a person's immune system into producing antibodies.
"We recognized that if we could somehow make a molecule that could essentially have a code for any protein we wanted, and put that into a patient or a subject safely, so that their own cells could convert that into a protein . . . that would be a remarkable new capability," Afeyan said. "We didn't have any way of doing it. We didn't have any proof it could be done. But we set out on a voyage."
That voyage led to a COVID-19 vaccine that has shown 94% efficacy in phase 3 trials.
Afeyan cautions that there's still more research to be done before the vaccine can be administered. The initial studies have focused exclusively on adults. Afeyan said Moderna expects to begin trials in teenagers this month, and will test the vaccine in children sometime in 2021.
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From Idea To Mass Production, Moderna's COVID Vaccine Will Come From Massachusetts - wgbh.org
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