NORWOOD, MASS. (WHDH) - Biotech giant Moderna on Tuesday announced plans to expand its Norwood site, including more than doubling of space to transform the facility from a production and lab space to an industrial technology center.
The expansion will increase Moderna’s production and lab space from about 300,000 square feet to about 650,000 square feet through the renovation of existing space and the acquisition of a 240,000-square-foot building located on the same campus, the company said in a news release.
“Our manufacturing facility has been core to our long-term strategy and has enabled us to provide the scale and flexibility to support the development of our mRNA medicines and vaccines including our COVID-19 vaccine,” Stéphane Bancel, Chief Executive Officer of Moderna, said in a statement. “We believe that this investment and expansion at our technology center will allow us to continue to optimize our mRNA products as we explore new pharmaceutical delivery forms such as prefilled syringes and lyophilized products. As we grow, we are committed to minimizing our environmental footprint.”
Bancel says the expansion will support a 50 percent increase in production of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine at its manufacturing site, which is expected to ramp up in late 2021 and early 2022.
When the expansion is complete, Moderna hopes to ramp up its technical development capacity and preclinical production capability with the goal of producing thousands of preclinical samples per month for research and development.
In April, Moderna announced that it expects to churn out up to 3 billion doses of its COVID-19 vaccine for global distribution by 2022.
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