On Jul. 9, 2020 Moderna and Laboratorios Farmaceuticos Rovi announced a collaboration for large-scale, commercial fill-finish manufacturing of Moderna’s mRNA vaccine candidate against COVID-19 (mRNA-1273) at ROVI’s facility in Madrid, Spain.

As part of the agreement, ROVI will provide vial filling and packaging capacity by procuring a new production line and equipment for compounding, filling, automatic visual inspection and labeling to support production of hundreds of millions of doses of the vaccine candidate intended in principle to supply markets outside of the U.S. starting in early 2021. ROVI will also hire additional staffing required to support manufacturing operations and production.

mRNA-1273 is an mRNA vaccine candidate against COVID-19 encoding for a prefusion stabilized form of the Spike (S) protein, which was selected by Moderna in collaboration with investigators from Vaccine Research Center (VRC) at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). On July 8, the Company’s Phase 2 study of mRNA-1273 completed enrollment. Moderna’s Phase 3 study of approximately 30,000 participants, is expected to begin in July 2020.