34 million doses to begin delivery in the fourth quarter of 2021
Option granted to COVAX Facility for up to 466 million additional doses in 2022
Doses provided at lowest tiered price, in keeping with Moderna’s global access principles commitment
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.---- Moderna, Inc. (Nasdaq: MRNA), a biotechnology company pioneering messenger RNA (mRNA) therapeutics and vaccines, today announced an agreement with Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance to supply up to 500 million doses of the COVID-19 Vaccine Moderna, including an initial 34 million doses to be delivered in the fourth quarter of 2021. Through this agreement, on behalf of the COVAX Facility, Gavi also retains the option to procure 466 million additional doses in 2022. All doses are offered at Moderna’s lowest tiered price, in line with the Company’s global access commitments.
This agreement covers the 92 Gavi COVAX Advance Market Commitment (AMC) low- and middle-income countries. The Company is in discussions to allocate and supply to self-financing participants in the future. COVAX is a global initiative co-led by Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance (Gavi), the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and the World Health Organization (WHO), to ensure equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines for all countries, regardless of income levels.
On April 30, the World Health Organization (WHO) issued an Emergency Use Listing (EUL) for Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine to prevent COVID-19 in individuals 18 years of age and older.
“I am grateful to our Gavi and COVAX partners for their tireless work and to the entire Moderna team for their collaboration to reach this agreement. This is an important milestone as we work to ensure that people around the world have access to our COVID-19 vaccine,” said Stéphane Bancel, Chief Executive Officer of Moderna. “We recognize that many countries have limited resources to access COVID-19 vaccines. We support COVAX’s mission to ensure broad, affordable and equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines and we remain committed to doing everything that we can to ending this ongoing pandemic with our mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.”
“We are very pleased to sign this new agreement with Moderna, giving COVAX Facility participants access to yet another highly efficacious vaccine,” said Dr. Seth Berkley, CEO of Gavi. “Expanding and having a diverse portfolio has always been a core goal for COVAX, and to remain adaptable in the face of this continually evolving pandemic – including the rising threat posed by new variants. This agreement is a further step in that direction.”
“We must find ways to help world-changing breakthroughs – especially in the form of life-saving medicines like mRNA – reach the entire world,” said Noubar Afeyan, Ph.D., Co-Founder and Chairman of Moderna, and CEO of Flagship Pioneering. “I am delighted that the Moderna team has been able to bring this agreement with COVAX to completion, and with it the opportunity to bring up to half a billion doses of our vaccine to populations in 92 of the lowest income countries in the world. Having experienced the impact such agreements can have on reaching global development goals, I could not be more excited.”
About the COVID-19 Vaccine Moderna
The COVID-19 Vaccine Moderna (referred to in the U.S. as the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine) is an mRNA vaccine against COVID-19 encoding for a prefusion stabilized form of the Spike (S) protein, which was co-developed by Moderna and investigators from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ (NIAID) Vaccine Research Center. The first clinical batch, which was funded by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, was completed on February 7, 2020 and underwent analytical testing; it was shipped to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on February 24, 42 days from sequence selection. The first participant in the NIAID-led Phase 1 study of the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine was dosed on March 16, 63 days from sequence selection to Phase 1 study dosing. On May 12, the U.S Food and Drug Administration granted the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine Fast Track designation. On May 29, the first participants in each age cohort: adults ages 18-55 years (n=300) and older adults ages 55 years and above (n=300) were dosed in the Phase 2 study of the vaccine. On July 8, the Phase 2 study completed enrolment.
Results from the second interim analysis of the NIH-led Phase 1 study of the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine in the 56-70 and 71+ age groups were published on September 29 in The New England Journal of Medicine. On November 30, 2020, Moderna announced the primary efficacy analysis of the Phase 3 study of the vaccine conducted on 196 cases. On November 30, 2020, the Company also announced that it filed for Emergency Use Authorization with the U.S.FDA and a Conditional Marketing Authorization (CMA) application with the European Medicines Agency. On December 18, 2020, the U.S. FDA authorized the emergency use of the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine in individuals 18 years of age or older. Moderna has also received authorization for its COVID-19 vaccine from health agencies in Canada, Israel, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Singapore, Qatar and Taiwan. Additional authorizations are currently under review in other countries.
Preclinical data on the Company’s variant-specific booster vaccine candidates have been submitted as a preprint to bioRxiv and will be submitted for peer-reviewed publication. These variant-specific vaccine candidates include mRNA-1273.351, which is more specifically targeted against the SARS-CoV-2 variant known as B.1.351 first identified in the Republic of South Africa, and a multivalent booster candidate, mRNA-1273.211, which combines mRNA-1273 (Moderna’s authorized vaccine against ancestral strains) and mRNA-1273.351 in a single vaccine. The Company’s Phase 2 study to evaluate three approaches to boosting is ongoing.
