(Ottawa) The pharmaceutical giant Moderna has made its choice. Montreal will host the RNA vaccine production plant the biotech company plans to open in Canada, has learned The Press. A denouement which will lead to the first meeting on the same platform between Justin Trudeau and François Legault since the federal elections of September 20, 2021.
Updated yesterday at 4:48 p.m.
Montreal thus outweighs the Toronto region, which was also in the running to obtain the “hundreds of millions of dollars” in investments that the company intends to make in the country over the next few years.
This news, which had been awaited for a few months by the pharmaceutical industry, will be confirmed on Friday in the metropolis by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, his Quebec counterpart François Legault and the CEO of Moderna, Stéphane Bancel, according to our information.
Influential ministers from the two capitals will also be present at this announcement, in particular the federal Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, François-Philippe Champagne, and the Minister of the Economy of the Legault government, Pierre Fitzgibbon.
“Moderna chose Montreal,” told The Press a source familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity because she was not authorized to speak publicly about Friday’s announcement. In the Legault government, we bomb the chest. “Quebec won over Ontario! “, welcomed a source.
This announcement is the culmination of several months of discussions and discussions between Mr. Champagne and the CEO of Moderna. It represents a significant step in the Trudeau government’s efforts to rebuild the country’s biomanufacturing and life sciences sector. It will help consolidate the ecosystem of the pharmaceutical industry in the Montreal region.
Recall that Moderna is one of the two major manufacturers of messenger RNA vaccines against COVID-19 in the world – the other being Pfizer/BioNTech. The vaccines produced by these two companies have been used by many countries to vaccinate their populations, including Canada and the United States. In Canada, the provinces also used the protein-based vaccine manufactured by the Swedish-British pharmaceutical group AstraZeneca, at the start of the vaccination campaign.
There is every indication that the federal government will commit to purchasing a quantity of the vaccines manufactured at Moderna’s new facilities over the next few years, among other things.
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted Canada’s vulnerability in several ways, including the lack of local production of effective coronavirus vaccines and the lack of production of personal protective equipment by Canadian companies, among other things. .
From the outset, Montreal had a head start on other Canadian cities in hosting Moderna’s new facilities. The importance of the pharmaceutical sector in the Quebec metropolis obviously worked in its favour.
The CEO of the pharmaceutical company announced last August, in Montreal, Moderna’s intention to establish itself in Canada. But Stéphane Bancel had indicated that he wanted to assess the advantages and disadvantages offered by the cities in the running before making his decision.
The company subsequently applied for funding for its project from the Quebec government, without guaranteeing that Montreal would ultimately be chosen. Investissement Québec is thus involved in the financial arrangement of the project.
A decision was expected before the end of 2021, but Moderna was forced to postpone the whole thing due to the virulence of a new wave of COVID-19 which then hit the continent, dominated by the Omicron variant.
In addition to its COVID-19 vaccine, Moderna already has 24 vaccines and therapeutics in development, including vaccines for influenza, RSV, cytomegalovirus, Zika and HIV, in addition to producing treatments for cancers and heart disease.
The choice of Montreal provokes an announcement that does not lack spice from a political point of view. Seven months after the federal election, Justin Trudeau and François Legault will meet for the first time on the same platform. During the campaign, in an intervention rarely seen on the part of a premier of Quebec, Mr. Legault had expressed his penchant for a minority Conservative government. He had asked Quebecers to be “wary” of Justin Trudeau, whose program is “centralizing” and “dangerous”. His exit had obviously scandalized the federal Liberals.
In an interview with The Pressin August, on the occasion of Moderna’s announcement, Minister François-Philippe Champagne said his intention was to ensure that Canada was never again dependent on the production of vaccines in factories established in the abroad in the event of another pandemic occurring.
“We did not choose the time of the pandemic. It is obvious that we will not choose the moment of the next one either. But there is one thing we can choose, and that is to be better prepared and to be more resilient. And that’s exactly what we’re doing,” he said.
“All the G7 countries would like to see these companies set up in their country. Moderna is well established in the United States, but this will be the first time the company has agreed to set up a center of excellence in RNA vaccines in another country. When we talk about RNA vaccines, that’s the future. Yes, there is the COVID-19 vaccine. But she also does research to treat cancer and other diseases. Having this here, in the local production ecosystem, is definitely a major gain for Canada,” he also said.
The federal government last year invested $126 million in the construction of the new National Research Council of Canada laboratory in Montreal, where the company Novavax manufactures its vaccine against COVID-19. This protein-based vaccine was authorized by Health Canada in February and is now used in Quebec. Novavax produces about 2 million doses per month of its vaccine in Montreal facilities.