2023-06-21 19:10:09
The Moderna vaccine updated with the Xbb family of variants, in detail Xbb.1.5, Kraken, will be ready for the autumn, in view of the next immunization campaign against Covid-19. This was announced by Chantal Friebertshaeuser, Senior Vice President, Commercial for Europe, Middle East, Australia and Canada, at a press conference in Rome with the CEO Stephane Bancel and the general manager of Moderna in Italy, Jacopo Murzi, for the opening of the Italian headquarters of the company.
“For the autumn vaccination campaign, the guidelines of the Ministry of Health on the target populations, certainly elderly and frail, and the methods are expected. There will be a race against time in all countries for the approval of new vaccines by of the regulatory agencies”, explained Murzi. The purchase procedure should remain centralized at European level, as for the first anti-Covid vaccines. Up to 50 million doses of the updated anti-Covid vaccine will be produced with the Xbb.1.5 variant, the very widespread Kraken. The vaccine will be filled in Italy, in the Thermo Fisher Scientific plants in Monza and Ferentino, a local partner of Moderna.
For ‘combo’ vaccines against various viruses, including Sars-Cov-2, it will be necessary “to wait for the development of the individual vaccines – says Murzi – that for the respiratory syncytial virus in 2024 and that for the flu towards the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025, then the combined Covid-flu and Covid-flu-RSV vaccines can be developed”. Moderna’s intention, currently, is to continue producing the vaccine against Covid-19 in the coming years.
“The pandemic is no longer an international public health emergency, but Covid will stay with us forever – warns Bancel – The virus has changed and is becoming similar to the flu, but continues to cause a high rate of hospitalizations and deaths, in particularly among the elderly and frail. We must make people understand that it is a serious disease for some, against which there are tools. Deaths from Covid today are avoidable”.
But Moderna “is not just a ‘Covid Company’. Thanks to the mRna platform, we are working on many other fronts, from tumors to other respiratory diseases and cardiovascular diseases. If until a few years ago it might have seemed like fiction, today it is reality: mRna is a messenger that allows you to supply the instructions to produce what is needed directly into the cells. The information becomes a drug”, underlines the CEO Stéphane Bancel.
The company ‘exploded’, within a few years, thanks to the Covid vaccine, created in record time with the innovative mRna platform. A technological revolution that marks the step “from analogical pharmaceuticals to digital pharmaceuticals”, explains Bacel. But Moderna, as the CEO immediately stated, is not just the company of the anti-Covid vaccine. “We have 48 drugs and 30 vaccines in development for cancer, infectious, rare, autoimmune and cardiovascular diseases. We have a platform to treat different diseases – the trick, basically, is to understand how the disease works and then make sure that what is needed ends up in the right place inside the cell, with a product tailored to the individual patient, for example in the case of oncology by reading the DNA of the tumor”. In 2023 Moderna “invested 4.5 billion dollars in research and development, for drugs and vaccines with mRna technology – continues Bancel – in 2019, before the pandemic, it was less than 500 thousand dollars. We do not yet have the budget for the next one year, but certainly investments in R&D will not decrease”.
Meanwhile, Moderna settles in Italy, with the opening of a new office in Rome, which will be the Italian headquarters. “We want to be more and more present and continue to build and consolidate our activities in Italy, a country that represents a fundamental part of our business and our operations in Europe”, explains Murzi. The Rome office is, therefore, a first step. “We are starting with 20 employees, but the plan is to double or triple them in the near future. We also aim to develop drugs in Italy thanks to the new legislation that has simplified the matter, favoring investments and the conduct of clinical trials in Italy. The third area of investment – says Murzi – is manufacturing.A large part of our production for Europe is currently done in Italy, with our local partner, Thermo Fisher in Monza and Ferentino for the production of mRna vaccines, to which other partners will be added. But we aim to be present with factories and production areas entirely owned by Moderna”.
The Rome office will play a key role “to develop and support – concludes Murzi – relations with private and institutional stakeholders, the scientific community and the local ecosystem of innovation and research”.
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