Manufacturing services for NVX-CoV2373 will take place at Baxter’s state-of-the-art facility in Halle/Westfalen, Germany. The site has broad sterile manufacturing capabilities, offers current good manufacturing practices (cGMP) manufacturing and is designed to deliver products with optimum efficiency and speed to market.
Marie Keeley, vice president, Baxter BioPharma Solutions, said: “The quest to develop vaccines for COVID-19 has reinforced the opportunity for industry partners to work together and contribute their unique capabilities and expertise for the benefit of all.
“We welcome the opportunity to work with an innovative company like Novavax and look forward to helping bring their vaccine candidate to the market.”
Rick Crowley, executive vice president, chief operations officer, Novavax, added: “Partners like Baxter BioPharma Solutions are enabling Novavax to quickly establish a commercial supply chain network to ensure access for global populations, and ultimately help bring about an end to the global COVID-19 pandemic.”
Additional details of the agreement have not been not disclosed.
NVX-CoV2373 is currently in Phase 3 trials in the UK, US and Mexico. Data from these trials is expected as soon as ‘early first quarter’ 2021, although timing will depend on transmission rates in these regions.
The two-dose vaccine (with doses administered 21 days apart) contains a full-length, prefusion spike protein made using Novavax’ recombinant nanoparticle technology and the company’s proprietary saponin-based Matrix-M adjuvant. The purified protein is encoded by the genetic sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 spike (S) protein and is produced in insect cells.
The vaccine is stable at 2°C to 8°C and is manufactured in a ready-to-use liquid formulation that permits distribution using standard vaccine supply chain channels.
Novavax’s supply agreements with governments on the continent include 60 million doses with the UK, while last month it concluded exploratory talks with the European Commission to provide up to 200 million doses.
The company is aiming to produce more than 2 billion doses per annum globally once at full capacity, expected in the middle of this year.
