The pharmaceutical company Rovi estimates that the production line of the active ingredient in the vaccine against the covid-19 from Modern from your plant Granada have a production capacity of about 100 million doses per year.
In an interview with Efe, the vice president and financial director of the firm, Javier López-Belmonte, highlighted that the agreement reached with the US company involves working with messenger RNA technology, which considers the present and surely the future of vaccines and of the pharmaceutical industry itself.
For Rovi, participating in the manufacture of Moderna’s vaccine from Granada is “a great challenge”, according to López Belmonte, who has underlined the high global impact that the project has for his company, given the level of investments in technological and productive resources and generating new jobs.
Apart from the growth opportunity that it represents for Rovi, it is a “very relevant” project for Madrid and Granada, an engine of direct and indirect employment in a particularly complex year due to the effects of the pandemic on the business fabric.
For the manufacture of the active principle of Moderna’s covid-19 vaccine, a new industrial investment is carried out in the facilities of the Rovi Group in Granada, where it has been present since 2009.
“At the moment we are adapting our facilities to be able to start the manufacture of the active ingredient in the third quarter of 2021“explained the vice president of the laboratories, who have calculated that this new production line in Granada has a capacity of about 100 million doses (of the active principle) per year.
López-Belmonte also explained that the collaboration between Rovi and Moderna currently has the “clear vocation” of contributing to the control of the pandemic and the eradication of covid-19.
A multi-year agreement
However, he has advanced that the agreement reached with Moderna is “for several years” and that he hopes that the expansion of the collaboration with the US firm will favor them to become its “long-term” manufacturing partner.
“We hope to be able to help Moderna in the future not only to manufacture their vaccine against covid-19 but also other products that they have in their pipeline (range under development),” he said.
Rovi, which has a plant in the Granada Health Technology Park (PTS), is currently working on the construction of a new one in the municipality of Escúzar.
“Fortunately, we can say that its construction is progressing at a good pace and that the pandemic has not caused delays in the schedule that we had set for this new Escúzar plant,” said the vice president of Rovi.
The company maintains the forecast that it will be fully operational in 2023, once the validation and regulatory processes that it will carry out in the first half of 2022 have passed.
It is a “very special” project for the company that has designed it to double its manufacturing capacity of the active principle of low molecular weight heparins, bemiparin and enoxaparin biosimilar, which accompanies the expansion and development strategy in this area.
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