OTTAWA — Seven months after Moderna and the federal government publicly agreed the U.S. pharmaceutical company would open a factory and research facility in Canada as soon as 2024, they are still unable to agree on the details.

The announcement, in Montreal just days before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called last summer’s election, was meant to boost Canada’s pharma capacity, and especially its capability to produce vaccines, as part of a big effort to renovate the country’s life-sciences industries.

“There are still ongoing discussions to finalize the agreement with Moderna, including the location of their facility,” Laurie Bouchard, a spokesperson for Innovation Minister François-Philippe Champagne, told The Logic. For more details, she suggested speaking to Moderna.

The company hopes the result will be a factory that’s ready to churn out vaccines to respond to the next pandemic, whenever it comes, said Moderna Canada’s general manager Patricia Gauthier, in an interview.

“It’s anchored in pandemic preparedness. What we saw happening in the [COVID-19] pandemic was everybody wanted to have doses first, and then we saw countries putting in place measures that were preventing [manufacturers] from exporting. This is first and foremost what we’re talking about here,” she said.

On March 7, the company announced it would work on vaccines against 15 global health threats, including Ebola, HIV and malaria.

Canada is strong in basic science and has a lot of capacity to manufacture generic drugs. The mRNA technology that’s Moderna’s specialty is famously novel, though, and production lines linked to the development facilities for new pharmaceuticals are few.

To have that capacity ready to spin up, Gauthier said, “we need to keep it warm.”

That means Moderna has to make products in Canada it can sell, year in and year out, pandemic or not. And that’s where the federal government comes in. Champagne said last summer that the terms of a deal with Moderna would depend on what it would make for Canadian use and in what quantities. That’s what they’re still negotiating.

The company is in similar talks in Australia, where it reached an agreement-in-principle for a factory in December.

“Australia has been phenomenal at moving at pace—moving fast, challenging their model, collaborating, and really not applying the same tools they’ve always used, but really thinking about, ‘Let’s create solutions that are fit for purpose, even if it means we need to have tailored solutions,’” Gauthier said.

“Tailored,” here, means “made just for Moderna.” Canada has programs like the Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF) to subsidize companies the federal government thinks are critical to the economy. Such programs are important and needed, Gauthier said, though “the SIF may be fit for some specific types of companies in their lifecycle, but not for others.”

Still, she said, the “opportunity” in Canada is more attractive than any “incentive.”

Moderna had been working on its mRNA-based technology for over a decade without yet making a sellable product. That’s not an unusual thing in the pharmaceutical industry: Canada’s Medicago worked on its vaccine technology for over 20 years before getting Health Canada’s approval for its first commercial product in February.

But as it happened, one of the pathogens Moderna had been working on was MERS-CoV, a respiratory bug much deadlier than the one that causes COVID-19, if not as easily spread. It is, as the “CoV” label implies, a coronavirus.

“We were an R&D company,” said Gauthier. “We had, before the pandemic, less than 1,000 employees in the world, and then COVID hits, we thought we had a strong solution and we started building out manufacturing capacity and presence around the world. So we became a commercial entity—very quickly.”

Now Moderna is up to 3,000 employees. Just 22 of those are in Canada, said Gauthier. But that’s about twice as many as it had here last fall, as the Canadian operation starts becoming more than an import service.

“Seven of them are Canadian employees sitting in Canada, but supporting the global or North America organization in clinical research, clinical development or medical affairs. They hired Canadians to support their global operations. So that speaks to talent,” she said.

Without dismissing the years of work that had gone into Moderna’s mRNA technology before 2020, the company was in the right place at the right time to hit a jackpot, Gauthier acknowledged. In 2019, it lost US$514 million. In 2020, on the verge of hitting the global market with its COVID-19 vaccine, it lost US$747 million.

In 2021, Moderna made US$12.2 billion.

Now it’s trying to turn that blessed timing into a stable, sustainable business to last generations, including figuring out its global footprint. Like Pfizer, the other company with an mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine on which Canada has relied heavily. Pfizer’s a global conglomerate founded in 1849.

The usefulness of mRNA for vaccines is proven—“de-risked,” Gauthier said—by Moderna’s COVID-19 shot, and the company has trials underway on inoculations for numerous other respiratory illnesses. Less advanced but also in progress is research on treatments for everything from cancers to autoimmune diseases to genetic conditions like cystic fibrosis.

“We’re not the grandfather of pharma,” Gauthier said. “It comes with opportunities to be agile and to think outside the box, maybe take different risks. But also it means that we don’t have everything mapped out for the next 25 years.”