Moderna has opened the doors to its long-anticipated Harwell vaccine production facility in the U.K., reaffirming its commitment to Britain as its competitors take shots at the country and retreat from previously planned projects there.
Dubbed the Moderna Innovation and Technology Centre, the site has the capacity to churn out as many as 100 million mRNA vaccine doses per year, with the ability to boost output to upward of 250 million doses annually in the event of a pandemic, the company said in a Sept. 25 press release. The facility also includes laboratories to analyze samples from Moderna’s global clinical trials.
The facility forms part of an ongoing, 10-year commitment between Moderna and the U.K., under which the Massachusetts-based company has also agreed to invest more than 1 billion pounds sterling ($1.3 billion) in domestic R&D.
Aside from using the site to provide England's National Health Service with mRNA shots for respiratory diseases, Moderna will also use the facility for mRNA research in areas like cancer, rare diseases and immune disorders.
“The opening of the Moderna Innovation and Technology Centre marks the first facility in the U.K. to manufacture an onshore supply of mRNA vaccines,” Stéphane Bancel, Moderna’s CEO, said in a statement Thursday. “Our strategic partnership with the U.K. has already delivered more than 20 clinical trials across 110 sites nationwide, making Moderna the largest commercial sponsor of trials in the country.”
Moderna's U.K. loyalty stands in contrast to many of its Big Pharma competitors, which have either curtailed or outright ended British expansion plans in recent weeks, often while citing the country’s onerous drug pricing policies.
Earlier this month, Eli Lilly began to back away from a $378 million biotech incubator project unveiled last year in cooperation with the U.K. government.
"Lilly is not yet in a position to finalize our investment in a Lilly Gateway Labs site, as we are awaiting more clarity around the U.K. life sciences environment," a company spokesperson told Fierce Pharma at the time.
The move came after Lilly in August temporarily paused U.K. shipments of its lucrative GLP-1 medicine Mounjaro as it prepared to jack up the medicine's local list price. Lilly framed the pricing decision as aligning with the Trump administration's goal to lower U.S. drug costs by increasing them in other nations.
Merck & Co. and hometown hero AstraZeneca have also walked back projects and operations in the U.K. as industry scrutiny of the country intensifies.
Meanwhile, Lilly's CEO David Ricks added fuel to the fire in an interview with the Financial Times earlier this week, in which he called the U.K. "probably the worst country in Europe" for drug pricing," adding that England is "not an attractive environment for investment."
But to hear Moderna's U.K. general manager Darius Hughes tell it, Ricks' comments were "a little harsh."
"I don't want to dull down some of the challenges that the rest of the industry have got, but we are in a different place," he said in a Wednesday interview with The Guardian. "We’re here for pandemic preparedness, for the vaccine programs, and to help protect British patients over the winter.”
Hughes added that Moderna will be "investing heavily in R&D" across its 10-year accord with the U.K.