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.
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.
“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.
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 flu vaccine given to older adults.
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.