:format(jpg)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/larazon/33W4MVNYQVBEHGZLSEGQMQ45RU.JPG "“We have high hopes of getting the HIV vaccine”")
They have gone from being an unknown laboratory to “stardom” in just one year. What has meant this radical change?
Moderna has gone from being a local research, implementation and development company to a global one with a well-known and recognized brand and marketing structure and, in between, there has been nothing less than a pandemic.
Their relationship with Spain is good and they are going to build a testing laboratory in Madrid, which will be operational next year. What jobs will they develop there?
It is a testing laboratory. Vaccines, 80% of the manufacturing time, is practically dedicated to quality before doing quality tests to check that it reaches people in optimal and suitable conditions. And this laboratory will basically be to check that quality. It is also a laboratory in which methods are going to be developed and improved, it also has some research and development. We produce many vaccines in Spain and we are going to test them in Spain as well. Complete vertical integration of the entire process takes place.
The link with the Spanish laboratory Rovi has also been reaffirmed…
With Rovi, what we have done is strengthen our collaboration and we have signed a long-term contract, for 10 years. Rovi continues to be one of the largest companies in the world in the capacity to produce vaccines and we are very happy with this relationship, it is really very positive and we want to maintain it and sustain it over time.
What are your figures in Spain?
They are very variable, like all Moderna. We have gone from being a company of a few hundred employees to one of a few thousand in a year. Perhaps we are now, 3,500 or 4,000 worldwide, we are growing and in Spain it continues to be the same, because this strengthening of the collaboration with Rovi will also bring new jobs in the implementation of the laboratory, the « commercial footprint» also brings new jobs. It is possible that, at full capacity, with the testing laboratory we are talking about 150-200 people. Regarding investment in Spain, Moderna has the objective this year of approximately 500 million euros.
They are researching with mRNA technology in many pathologies that currently lack a vaccine. What will it be, the next Modern?
The next vaccine to be approved, let’s cross our fingers, is the new bivariate to continue fighting the pandemic effectively. It will have the original variant, the one from Wuhan, and also one specific to the one from Ómicron, which is now the predominant one in Spain. We have had very positive preliminary data released two weeks ago and hope to have approval by the end of the summer. The perfect thing would be for it to be available to the population for the autumn campaign.
And which one, perhaps not so close, do you think will be more impressive?
In the medium and long term we are investigating in many different areas. The one that causes me the most enthusiasm is the flu and covid vaccine, which is going to be the first of the combined ones that we are going to release, and that is going to allow us to advance in the objective that we have set for ourselves as a vaccine company. medium and long-term pan-respiratory that covers not only the flu or covid, but other respiratory pathologies such as common colds and others.
More than HIV?
The one for HIV is already in a clinical trial. We reached an agreement with the WHO to work on the 15 diseases that produce the greatest risk for the population and our commitment was to have them all in clinical trials by at least 2025. That includes HIV, and the truth is that we are optimistic about having something , it is a very complicated virus, it has been looking for a vaccine for 20 years and it is resisting but we are very hopeful that we can do it.
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