The crucial third party players in the pandemic fight
Good afternoon, readers.
Drug development and drug manufacturing aren’t exactly the same thing. Research for the development of innovative new compounds may begin in the halls of academic institutions, proceed to collaborations with pharmaceutical companies, and then reach even further into other links in the supply chain who help scale up the production of a pharmaceutical product.
That last part is, for obvious reasons, extremely important in the midst of a pandemic. You need to ramp up manufacturing, whether that be replicating a substance in bulk or helping put a COVID vaccine or therapeutic into a vial, to facilitate a global immunization campaign. And that’s where contract manufacturers such as Catalent, Lonza, and Emergent BioSolutions come into play.
Those may not be household names, but these firms are on the frontlines of the pandemic fight in one way or another, as I explore in my most recent piece on how COVID vaccine production works on the ground level.
Take it from Moderna, one of the first companies to gain FDA authorization for its mRNA technology-based coronavirus shot.
“For us, with mRNA in particular, I would say, the contractors are an especially critical path upfront as suppliers, to help with our processes,” says Ray Jordan, chief corporate officer at Moderna and a veteran of both Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson.
“And then downstream to things like fill and finish, which is where once you have your drug substance and you’re then trying to get it into, you know, the usable vials and so on, that process is not one that we have. So, we’re entirely dependent on contract firms for that.”
Read my full report here. And then read on for the day’s news. Back to David Z. Morris tomorrow.
Sy Mukherjee
sy.mukherjee@fortune.com
@the_sy_guy
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