Moderna, Rovi ink 10-year contract extension for production of COVID and future vaccines

Moderna extended its manufacturing partnership with Spain’s Laboratorios Farmacéuticos Rovi, inking a 10-year pact covering the production of the biotech's COVID-19 vaccine as well as future mRNA-based drugs and immunizations.

The pact comes a little over a year and a half after the two companies inked a deal for Rovi to complete fill-finish operations for hundreds of millions of doses of Moderna’s then-investigative COVID vaccine.

Under the new long-term agreement, Moderna will make a unspecified number of investments in Rovi’s Madrid facility to allow it to boost capacity. Financial details of the deal, which is expected to close by the end of the first quarter this year, weren’t disclosed.

"Rovi has been a pivotal partner in supporting the manufacturing of our COVID-19 mRNA vaccine for countries outside of the U.S., and this long-term agreement expands our partnership and allows for further scale-up for future mRNA medicines,” Juan Andres, Moderna's chief technical operations and quality officer, said in a statement.

RELATED: Moderna inks fill-finish pact with Spain's Rovi for 'hundreds of millions' of COVID-19 shot doses

Moderna, like other COVID vaccine producers, has spent much of the last two years ramping up manufacturing operations either by expanding existing sites or by building new facilities along with adding contract manufacturers to its manufacturing network. For the Massachusetts-based biopharma company, that’s included deals with CDMO giants such as Catalent and Lonza.

In October, Moderna unveiled plans to build a $500 million mRNA manufacturing facility in Africa that will take between two and four years to complete. The proposed facility is expected to be able to manufacture hundreds of millions of vaccine doses a year as the company and the industry begins to look past the pandemic and toward future demand for vaccines. Moderna has not disclosed the exact site of the factory.