CAMBRIDGE, MA / ACCESSWIRE / February 9, 2022 / Moderna, Inc. (Nasdaq:MRNA), a biotechnology company pioneering messenger RNA (mRNA) therapeutics and vaccines, today announced that Juan Andres, Chief Technical Operations and Quality Officer, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), broadly recognized as one of the highest acknowledgments of achievement in the field of engineering.
"We are delighted that the National Academy of Engineering has recognized Juan for his outstanding contributions. Juan has led our manufacturing from an early-stage clinical development company to a commercial company," said Stéphane Bancel, Chief Executive Officer of Moderna. "In our first year of commercial operations, he led manufacturing, quality control and distribution of more than 800 million doses of our COVID-19 vaccine globally, all in the midst of a pandemic. For context, we made fewer than 100,000 doses in 2019. That is an incredible scale-up in two years. We, and the hundreds of millions of people across the globe who received the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, owe Juan our gratitude. I am thankful to have him as a member of Moderna's Executive Committee and to count him as a partner and a friend."
Juan was cited by the NAE for his "technical leadership in the scale-up and manufacturing of important pharmaceutical products, including the COVID mRNA-1273 vaccine." Responsible for the supply of product required for Moderna's preclinical and clinical development programs, as well as scaling the CMC (chemistry, manufacturing and controls) processes across Moderna's portfolio. Juan leads all CMC late-stage development and commercialization activities for Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine, Spikevax®, and its broad pipeline of 40 development programs.
In his role at Moderna, Juan is leading the rapid manufacturing scale up for Spikevax. In 2021, Moderna shipped approximately 807 million doses of Spikevax to countries around the world. Today, Juan's team has grown to more than 1,500 from 350 at the end of 2019, when Moderna was manufacturing fewer than 10,000 doses per month. Moderna has also expanded its global manufacturing footprint, growing its Massachusetts-based technology center campus and establishing strategic partnerships for manufacturing in Switzerland, Spain, the Netherlands and France and South Korea.
Juan was previously the Global Head of Technical Operations (Manufacturing and Supply Chain) for more than 25,000 Novartis employees across all of its divisions. In this role, he had responsibility for all of Novartis' manufacturing sites, and related support functions and technologies worldwide, overseeing small molecules drug substance and drug product, as well as biologics drug substance, drug product and technical development. Juan's previous roles at Novartis included Group Novartis Quality Head, Global Head of Technical Research and Development, and Global Pharmaceutical Operations Head. Prior to Novartis, he worked at Eli Lilly & Co. for 18 years in a variety of manufacturing, production and quality roles in the United States, Puerto Rico, UK and Spain, most recently serving as Vice President, Pharmaceutical Manufacturing.
The latest NAE peer elections bring the Academy's total U.S. membership to 2,388, plus 310 international members. The NAE's mission is "to advance the well-being of the nation by promoting a vibrant engineering profession and by marshalling the expertise and insights of eminent engineers to provide independent advice to the federal government on matters involving engineering and technology."
For more information about the NAE, please visit their website at https://www.nae.edu/.
About Moderna
In 10 years since its inception, Moderna has transformed from a science 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. Moderna maintains alliances with a broad range of domestic and overseas government and commercial collaborators, which has allowed for the pursuit of both groundbreaking science and rapid scaling of manufacturing. Most recently, Moderna's capabilities have come together to allow the authorized use of one of the earliest and most-effective vaccines against the COVID-19 pandemic.
Moderna's mRNA platform builds on continuous advances in basic and applied mRNA science, delivery technology and manufacturing, and has allowed the development of therapeutics and vaccines for infectious diseases, immuno-oncology, rare diseases, cardiovascular diseases, and auto-immune diseases. Moderna has been named a top biopharmaceutical employer by Science for the past seven years. To learn more, visit www.modernatx.com.
Moderna Contacts
Media:
Colleen Hussey
Director, Corporate Communications
617-335-1374
[email protected]
Investors:
Lavina Talukdar
Senior Vice President & Head of Investor Relations
617-209-5834
[email protected]
SOURCE: Moderna, Inc.