Moderna, Inc., a biotechnology company pioneering mRNA therapeutics and vaccines, and Laboratorios Farmacéuticos Rovi, S.A. (ROVI), a pan-European pharmaceutical company, announced a long-term collaboration to increase capacities for the compounding, aseptic filling, inspection, labelling, and packaging of ROVI's facilities, located in Madrid, San Sebastián de los Reyes and Alcalá de Henares.

This new agreement, which has a term of ten years, includes a series of investments expected to allow the manufacturing capacity to increase across ROVI's facilities in Madrid, Spain. In addition to producing Moderna's Covid-19 vaccine, ROVI's platform could also be utilized to service future Moderna mRNA vaccine candidates.

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

Juan López-Belmonte Encina, ROVI's chairman and chief executive officer, said: "We are delighted to expand our collaboration with Moderna and become a long-term manufacturing partner. At ROVI, we are working to contribute all our experience as a high-technological-value contract manufacturer of injectables to the solution of this pandemic, and we are confident of our ability to take part in the manufacturing of new mRNA candidates in the future."

Moderna and Rovi are expected to finalize details of this agreement in the first quarter of 2022.

In 10 years since its inception, Moderna has transformed from a research-stage company advancing programs in the field 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.

ROVI is a pan-European pharmaceutical company specializing and engaging in the research, development, contract manufacturing and marketing of small molecules and biological specialties.