Moderna Partners with Adium to Expand Global Footprint into Latin America

Moderna, Inc., a biotechnology company pioneering messenger RNA (mRNA) therapeutics and vaccines announced, February 22nd, an agreement with Adium Pharma S.A., a leading private Latin American pharmaceutical company, to support the commercialization and distribution of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, Spikevax across Latin America. 

The New Agreement Covers 18 Countries in Latin America

Moderna has a commercial footprint in 56 countries across the world through direct presence and distributors and intends to expand to ten more markets in 2022. 

The new agreement covers 18 countries in Latin America, including Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina. “Our new partnership with Adium will help ensure broad access and delivery of our Moderna COVID-19 vaccine to people across Latin America,” said Stéphane Bancel, Chief Executive Officer of Moderna. “A presence in Latin America is a key part of our global commercial strategy. These partnerships and the expansion of our global commercial footprint position Moderna to play an important role in providing healthcare security against COVID-19 and future vaccine-preventable diseases.” 

Moderna has a commercial presence in 11 countries worldwide (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, UK, U.S.) and recently announced plans to increase its commercial footprint across ten additional markets in Asia-Pacific (Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan) and Europe (Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Sweden) in 2022. In Latin America, Moderna has established bilateral and supranational supply agreements in 15 countries. 

The Company also has commercial agreements with distributors to supply the Company’s COVID-19 vaccine in 45 countries, with Zuellig Pharma in the Asia Pacific, Medison Pharma in Central Eastern Europe and Israel, and Adium Pharma in Latin America. 

The Company Also Has a Supply Agreement with the Vaccine Alliance

Alliance Moderna also announced an agreement with Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, to supply up to 650 million doses of the Company’s COVID-19 Vaccine across 2021 and 2022, covering the 92 Gavi COVAX Advance Market Commitment (AMC) low- and middle-income countries. 

• COVAX, the vaccine pillar of the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-Accelerator), has now shipped over 1 billion doses to 144 countries and territories
• To respond to new challenges and support equitable vaccination in countries, Gavi aims to raise at least US$ 5.2 billion in new funding. The goals of this financing are outlined in Break COVID Now, the Investment Opportunity for the Gavi COVAX Advance Market Commitment (Gavi COVAX AMC), and includes US$ 3.7 billion to fund a 600 million dose Pandemic Vaccine Pool, US$ 1 billion to support AMC country readiness and delivery and US$ 545 million to cover costs for rollout of donated doses.

Regulators have approved Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine in more than 70 markets, including Canada, Japan, the European Union, the UK, and Israel. In 2021, 807 million doses of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine were shipped globally, with approximately 25% of those doses shipped to low and middle-income markets. 

Last July, Danaher Corporation announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Aldevron, a Moderna supplier, from EQT Private Equity for an enterprise value of $9.6 billion. In May, Danaher had reached an agreement to supply plasmid DNA to Moderna to serve as the genetic template for producing the mRNA Covid-19 vaccine as well as other investigational programs.

Partnerships between Big Pharma to Push Research for New Treatments

Efforts to further research and drug production to successfully find new treatments are pushing big pharma companies to make alliances. Last December, The Israel Biotech Fund and Amazon Web Services partnered with pharmaceutical giants Pfizer, Merck, AstraZeneca, and Teva Pharmaceuticals to open an innovation lab.

The biomedical research lab will be carefully designed and constructed to avoid the release of biohazards. The facility will incorporate a biomedical research lab, as well as a cloud-based computational platform. These lab facilities are to be used by early-stage startups, from the idea stage through to proof of concept. The goal is to use artificial intelligence to rapidly find new treatments, avoid animal experimentation, and push healthcare towards more personalized medicine.

By harnessing advanced AI algorithms, cloud-based computational capabilities, and machine learning, the discovery of new drugs can come about more efficiently. New technology and AI are revolutionizing the pharmaceutical industry when it comes to developing drugs and vaccines in record time, including Moderna and Pfizer’s mRNA vaccines. To this end, AION Labs will work with each of the sponsoring pharmaceutical companies to choose a few research and development challenges to focus on each year. These could include ways in which to discover new drugs based on AI, as well as developing new technologies to help develop those drugs.

About Moderna

In 10 years since its inception, Moderna has transformed from a research-stage company advancing programs in the eld of messenger RNA (mRNA), to an enterprise with a diverse clinical portfolio of vaccines and therapeutics across seven modalities, a broad intellectual property portfolio in areas including mRNA and lipid nanoparticle formulation, and an integrated manufacturing plant that allows for both clinical and commercial production at scale and at unprecedented speed. 

Moderna maintains alliances with a broad range of domestic and overseas government and commercial collaborators, which has allowed for the pursuit of both groundbreaking science and rapid scaling of manufacturing. Most recently, Moderna’s capabilities have come together to allow the authorized use and approval of one of the earliest and most-effective vaccines against the COVID-19 pandemic. Moderna’s mRNA platform builds on continuous advances in basic and applied mRNA science, delivery technology, and manufacturing, and has allowed the development of therapeutics and vaccines for infectious diseases, immuno-oncology, rare diseases, cardiovascular diseases, and auto-immune diseases.