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Global pharmaceutical company Novartis announced on Friday that it has signed an early agreement to strengthen the manufacturing capacity of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine.
The company intends to take mRNA ingredients from BioNTech, load them into vials at its site in Stein, Switzerland, and send them back to BioNTech for worldwide distribution, according to a company announcement.
Work will begin in the second quarter of 2021, pending final agreements.
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“Novartis has mobilized on several fronts to support the global response to the pandemic,” Steffen Lang, head of technical operations at Novartis, said in the press release issued on Friday. “As a company reinventing medicine with advanced therapy platforms, we are committed to leveraging our manufacturing capabilities to help support the supply of COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics around the world. We expect this to be the first of a number of such agreements. “
Novartis said its manufacturing team is in late talks with many companies to help with manufacturing tasks such as “mRNA production, therapeutic protein production. [and] production of raw materials’ for vaccines and therapeutics against the new virus, which has claimed the lives of nearly 2.2 million lives worldwide to date, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
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Pfizer-BioNTech’s two-dose COVID-19 vaccine continues to roll out worldwide and represents more than 14 million vaccinations in the United States, while 11.7 million Aemricans have received a vaccine developed by Moderna, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
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