Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in the rapid development of vaccine and antiviral drug production around the world. Lonza, a Swiss multinational biotech company is helping Moderna firm in its vaccine production against Covid-19.

As per a statement issued by Lonza on Tuesday, September 29, 2020, the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine shall be ready for commercialization by the end of this year.

According to their action plan, a new vaccine ingredients would be created by the Lonza team in November at its new production lines in New Hampshire and Portsmouth. Simultaneously, 300 million vaccine doses shall be supplied annually by other lines of the company, mainly in the Visp facility located deep in a valley in the Swiss Alps.

The head of the Lonza’s Visp facility, Torsten Schmidt said in an interview recently, that the equipment used for the vaccine production had been transported and secured by the company to avoid ‘any last-minute setbacks.’ At the same Visp facility, Moderna has completed 50% of the production work carried out by its $210 million production line.

Lonza has partnered with other customers too apart from Moderna, which includes Sanofi, California’s Humanigen, and Roche. The company’s drug unit revenue experienced a huge percentage gain earlier this year. Currently hiring workers, Lonza is expecting to have approximately 4,000 workers by the month of January in its Visp facility.

Moderna and Lonza are in a 10-year contract for the supply of ingredients and 1 billion doses annually for Covid-19 vaccine production. These ingredients comprise of nano-lipid packed genetic material, which is a synthetic messenger RNA (mRNA) frozen at a temperature of -70^o Celsius. This genetic material is responsible for inducing a strong immunogenic response in the host body against the virus which causes Covid-19. The frozen material is then shipped to laboratories in Spain for their final stage of the vaccine manufacturing process.

The Visp town mayor, Niklaus Furger, said that he is a bit proud of his town and its talented workers in the case of the possibility of them managing to launch the first-ever vaccine against Covid-19. He said that the idea that a vaccine might just be produced in Visp with which we could fight against the pandemic, would be excellent. For certain, the attention of the world would be trained on Visp along with Lonza, something that admittedly would make the town and its people a little bit proud.

 The author is a student member of Amity Centre of Happiness.