Moderna
CEO Stéphane Bancel said Wednesday that new positive data on the company’s influenza vaccine, and an aggressive plan to launch 15 products over the next five years, shows that his company will no longer be defined by the Covid-19 vaccines that made it a household name.
“This is not a Covid vaccine company,” Bancel told Barron’s on Wednesday, as the company prepared to unveil a new five-year plan at a presentation on the company’s research pipeline. “This is a true platform company with an incredible probability of technical success versus pharma.”
It’s a message aimed at investors who have dumped the stock this year, sending shares down 39.5% as demand for
Moderna
‘s Covid-19 vaccine wanes. Shares rose 3.2% on Wednesday as investors digested the new data, and Bancel’s focus on post-Covid Moderna.
The strategy laid out Wednesday includes the launch of 15 new products by 2025, and implied target of more than $30 billion in annual revenues by the early 2030s. Moderna says it expects new respiratory vaccines to add between $10 billion and $15 billion in annual sales by 2027, and new cancer, rare disease, and latent disease products to add between $10 billion and $15 billion in annual sales by 2032.
That’s the future. The present is tougher. Wall Street analysts expect Moderna (ticker: MRNA) revenues to drop to $7 billion this year, from $19.3 billion last year, as Covid-19 vaccine sales bottom out.
The Covid-19 vaccine remains the company’s only product, and though U.S. regulators this week approved an updated version, expectations for uptake remain low. Bancel himself said he is scheduled to receive his own dose of the company’s updated Covid-19 shot on Monday at a CVS Pharmacy.
“We started shipping product in the trucks yesterday,” Bancel said, roughly 24 hours after the Food and Drug Administration issued its approval of the new shots. The company in August dropped its estimate of the total U.S. Covid-19 vaccine market for this year to between 50 million and 100 million doses, from an earlier estimate of 100 million, and despite rising hospitalizations in the U.S., Bancel is still sticking by those lower estimates.
“Do I think it’s going to be 100 [million]? Not necessarily,” he said. “Do I think it’s going to be north of 50? I do.”
The Moderna influenza vaccine, which is built on the same backbone as the approved Covid-19 vaccine, has been seen as a bellwether for the company’s fortunes. Earlier trials have been disappointing, and the vaccine has struggled to demonstrate a similar profile to other flu vaccines on the market.
The company said Wednesday that a new Phase 3 study, which used an updated version of its flu vaccine and measured immune responses in patients who received the shots, hit all of its predetermined targets. What’s more, in a separate study, the updated flu vaccine elicited immune responses that were as good or better as Fluzone HD, a highly-effective
Sanofi
(SNY) flu vaccine given to older adults.
Bancel is now counting his influenza program as a win. Now he says he has three infectious disease vaccines that have clocked wins in Phase 3 trials, and three rare disease drugs that have returned positive clinical signals. “What would have been the odds if we’d been doing small molecule, or large molecule” drugs, he said, citing the relatively low probabilities of success in traditional drug development. “What is it, like 1%, 0.5%, when you combine all those things?”
For Bancel, it’s a reaffirmation of the argument he has been making for more than a decade at Moderna: Once this technology works, it really starts to hum. To that end, he says that the company will now add 50 drugs to the Moderna pipeline over the next five years.
Not all observers were as optimistic about the new flu data on Wednesday. While announcing the positive results of the new Phase 3 trial that examines the immune response elicited by the flu vaccine, Moderna also said that it wouldn’t continue another Phase 3 trial that had directly tested the vaccine’s efficacy. In a note Wednesday, Leerink Partners analyst Mani Foroohar wrote that the news that the company wouldn’t continue that trial demonstrates the vaccine’s “lack of a competitive profile.”
Foroohar explained to Barron’s that the decision not to continue that trial would make it difficult to judge the shot’s clinical benefit. It remains to be seen whether the FDA will approve the vaccine based on the immunogenicity data alone. Bancel, for his part, says he now thinks that his flu shot has more commercial potential than he’d previously imagined.
“I believe we’re gonna get bigger share than what I believed six months ago,” he said. For Bancel, however, the real target is the combination vaccines, which will include the company’s flu, Covid-19, and RSV vaccines, in various combinations. “With combo, we’re going to take share from
Pfizer
Covid alone, and share from the flu,” he says.
Bancel continues to think big. Speaking to Barron’s on Wednesday, he discussed a long-term plan to partner with a company that provides blood tests for early-stage cancers, known as liquid biopsies, and to offer personalized shots to treat early-stage cancers the tests identify. “It’s something we’re very interested in exploring in the clinic,” Bancel says.
The vision is an extension of the technology the company is testing in later-stage cancers in partnership with
Merck
(MRK). A trial in melanoma is ongoing; the company on Wednesday announced a plan for a second trial in lung cancer. If it works, it has the potential to be as revolutionary as the introduction of mRNA technology was in late 2020.
So far, things have generally gone Bancel’s way. Bancel said that, if you had come up to him at the end of his R&D day presentation five years ago in New York and described where the company now stands, “[Moderna president] Stephen [Hoge] and I would have said, Geez, we’re talking about the best case scenario of a five year plan. And that’s where we are today.”
Write to Josh Nathan-Kazis at [email protected]
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