Moderna at Goldman Sachs Conference: Strategic Growth and Cost Reduction

On Wednesday, 11 June 2025, Moderna Inc. (NASDAQ:MRNA) presented at the Goldman Sachs 46th Annual Global Healthcare Conference. CEO Stephane Benzel outlined the company’s strategic focus on driving growth through existing and new products while managing costs. Despite challenges in COVID vaccine demand, Moderna remains optimistic about its future prospects, supported by international partnerships and a diversified pipeline.

Key Takeaways

• Moderna aims to launch around 10 new products in the coming years.
• The company is focusing on respiratory vaccines for high-risk groups to generate cash.
• Cost reduction efforts are projected to decrease cash costs to $4.2 billion by 2027.
• Moderna plans to return to profitability by 2028.
• Strategic international partnerships are expected to boost sales starting in 2026.

Financial Results

• Moderna’s cash costs have been significantly reduced from $6.3 billion last year to a projected $4.2 billion in 2027.
• The company anticipates sales outside the US could reach $1 billion in 2026, driven by new factories in Canada, the UK, and Australia.
• Moderna expects 2025 to be the lowest point in terms of sales, with growth accelerating from 2026 onwards.

Operational Updates

• Moderna is finalizing its respiratory vaccine portfolio, including COVID, RSV, flu, and combo vaccines.
• The company is pausing phase three investments for latent viruses and seeking partnerships for these programs.
• Moderna has reduced cash costs by 19% year over year in Q1, focusing on streamlining the pipeline and driving productivity with AI.

Future Outlook

• Moderna plans to expand its INT program across various tumor types and earlier stages of disease.
• The company aims to re-enter the European market post-2026 when the existing Pfizer contract expires.
• Expected developments include melanoma Phase 3 data in 2026 and a potential norovirus vaccine launch in 2026 or 2027.

Q&A Highlights

• Moderna sees potential upside in the US COVID vaccine market by focusing on high-risk populations.
• The company is actively seeking partnerships for its latent virus programs to manage costs effectively.
• Moderna is optimistic about its CMV vaccine candidate, citing encouraging Phase 2 data and a significant unmet medical need.

In conclusion, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for a detailed understanding of Moderna’s strategic directions discussed at the conference.

Full transcript - Goldman Sachs 46th Annual Global Healthcare Conference:

Unidentified speaker: So much for joining us. Really pleased to have Stephane Benzel, CEO of Moderna, with us. Maybe just start here, Stephane. You know, in the context of the current environment, both from a COVID demand and regulatory standpoint and the overall health care policy that we’re seeing flow through from HHS and FDA and then there’s the drug pricing dynamics. But just walk us through today where Moderna’s business stands from a revenue and expenses standpoint and also a pipeline strategy when you start to absorb kind of all these dynamics that are playing out.

Stephane Benzel, CEO, Moderna: Sure. Well, good morning.

Unidentified speaker: Good morning.

Stephane Benzel, CEO, Moderna: And thank you for having us. You must be exhausted because I’ve seen a lot of emails coming from you this week and your team, so thank you for your work. And thank you for having us. So basically, let me start maybe by Moderna, and then I will talk about how context around us in The US impacts us. So basically, as you know, because you follow the company pre IPO, we have this mRNA platform that we built over many, many years doing the science because we always believed it would be zero drug or a lot of drugs, because mRNA is information.

And we focused on infectious disease vaccine, oncology, rare genetic disease, and we think over time, we could also play in over fields, including autoimmune disease. If you look at where we are today, our priority is pretty simple. Three priorities. One, drive a top line back to growth with existing products. Priority number two is launch new product.

As you know, we have around 10 products that we can launch in the next couple of years, which is very exciting for patients and for shareholders. And is to really drive a cost down, to right size the company to where we are today compared to where we are during the pandemic. Because as you know, our company is scaled tremendously because we worked really hard to get literally billions of those to a market. And, of course, the company was not ready for it. So we didn’t do it efficiently because we had to do it with high quality, and we had to do it with speed.

So cost was not the highest priority at the time. And so if you look at where we are now, the next few years, our strategy is to finalize our portfolio of respiratory vaccines, focus mostly on people at high risk, meaning the elderly, 65, and adult eighteen to sixty four at high risk. As you know, we have now three product approved, which kind of prove the platform in the sense is really working. Three product approved, including the one happening at the May, a few days ago. And so our strategy is to finalize this investment in R and D because all our phase threes are behind us.

As you know, we’re going to get the full data this summer for phase three efficacy, as we shared recently. And so those costs are going to basically phase out. And this is profitable franchise because the manufacturing infrastructure is already here because of COVID. And so if you think about what we’re trying to do over next few years is finalize the respiratory portfolio to have a broadest respiratory portfolio, COVID, RSV flu, and flu plus COVID combo, generating a lot of cash, investing that cash into oncology platform. So of course, there’s INT, but as you know, there’s around 10 products that are just beyond INT.

Some are moving into phase two, like our immunotherapy product. We have quite a number of products that we shared at ASCO last year that are going to are in the clinic, are going to move in the clinic very, very soon. And then, course, there’s a rare disease as well. What we have decided to pause for now, because we’re focusing on cost, is the latent viruses. As you know, we shared at Vaccine Day eighteen months ago.

I think great data for EBV in phase one two, for VZV in phase one two. We have some HSV product. But those products, as we said last year at the R and D Day, last September, we will not take to phase three on our own now. We are actively looking at partnership, other project financing like we did with Blackstone last year in flu, or Big Pharma. As you know, we’ve done a lot of dealing our history with AstraZeneca.

We’ve done several deals with Merck and our colleagues at Vertex. And so we are able and willing to do deals when it’s the right thing for the company and the shareholders. So that’s a bit where we are in terms of strategy. In terms of the sales, I think it’s important to look at US sales where the context I’m going come into in a minute is important, and also outside The US sales. So if you look at The US if you look at it, the recent guidelines that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine by the commissioner and the new head of CBER, we actually see as constructive.

Because, as you know, there was a lot of worry into the media, a lot of headlines about COVID. Are they going to take the COVID vaccine out of the market? And if you look at the paper, I think what is quite interesting is that the population they want to focus on, which we think makes a lot of sense, we’ve always talked, as you know, you’ve seen our presentation for many years, we said the people at high risk are the one that needs to be protected. It’s mostly the elderly, 65, 18 64 at high risk. If you look at their paper, they mentioned in The US a population of around 100,000,000 people that will qualify for those respiratory vaccines that I will extrapolate from the COVID because it’s all the same as we know.

What is interesting is if you look at last year, number of COVID shot given in The US was actually 40,000,000 doses, four zero. And so there’s a potential world, if you look the next few years, that we might have stabilized the COVID number of doses. And with the authorities wanting to really protect people at high risk, there’s a potential upside. Again, it’s too early to tell. But if you look at the paper that just published, and again, is the FDA Commissioner, there’s a potential upside that if they want to recommend and have the medical community and the pharmacy channels really focus on the population, there could be some upside.

So RSV, as we know, had a great year, but what’s happening now, because of AC Pro commendation, last year, the market has slowed down tremendously in term of size. We believe it’s gonna be a few years before we get clarity. I think the the CDC is basically looking at epidemiology and trying to figure out when should people get boosted, again, people at high risk. As you know, we should soon have a PDUFA date for the RSV high risk eighteen to sixty four. We already have our products approved, you know, 65 and above.

And that would be, we think, important because, again, aligned with COVID, and, again, similar things should happen to flu is for respiratory vaccine. You want to really provide them and protect people at high risk. So that’s kind of priority number one in The US. So I know there’s a lot of headlines, but this New England Journal FDA COVID policy paper and the approval of December, you know, May on its PDUFA date. I’ve read a lot of people in the media, a lot of analysts, a lot of investors that were worried, are we gonna even get it?

As you know, there’s been a lot of delays across the industry on PDUFA in the last few months, and so we are very pleased and very thankful for our team and the team at FDA, that I know the working team at FDA works really hard because we’re in daily discussions with our team to get this to a finish line. And we’re very pleased that there’s going to be a new product with higher efficacy and a head to head efficacy study versus Spivax available to the elderly. And think it will help drivers of the market and the penetration based on what the commissioner and the government administration is trying to push through. The other piece is outside The US. We should not forget that our business is roughly fiftyfifty.

And what I think is not fully always appreciated by all investors about Moderna in our OUS strategy is two things in terms of growth looking forward. One is what the three countries where we have set up factories for long term partnership, those are seven years partnership from when the factory is up and running in Canada, UK, and Australia. If you look at those this year, those factories are coming online, so you will not get a full year impact. In ’26, we’re gonna get a full year impact of those factories, and they are not only for COVID, they are for respiratory vaccines. So as we have RSV approved in most of those countries, and soon, December and then flu plus COVID, you can see a world where the sales are gonna be substantial.

And to try to help you calibrate this just back of the envelope, last year, if you look at our SEC filing, we’re around $500,000,000 of sales in The UK, and it was just COVID. So I think using a $500,000,000 for The UK moving forward is not a crazy number. I think other things wise, it’s reasonable knowing that it’s gonna be also flu, RSV and flu post COVID. And if you look at the population, to help you with the math, Canada and Australia are roughly the same population as The UK. So you could see that ballpark getting when those factories are running full speed next year in ’26, could have potentially a billion dollar of sales there.

If you look at the guidance this year, 1.5 to 2.5, you can see that those three countries are gonna be significant in ’26 in term of growth and then in term of stability of cash flow and sales in the next seven years. Then as you know, we have been excluded of Europe on COVID because of a contract that was done without a tender by the EU during COVID in 2021 and Pfizer. That contract expire in ’26. We’re starting to see a little bit of sales because some countries like Poland, its public information, have sued the EU and are out of a Pfizer contract. And so last year, for example, we supplied Poland.

There’s a lot of countries in The Nordics and countries like Portugal that actually have been using that contract pretty quickly because they have high vaccination rates. And so we think in ’25, we should have more opportunities in Europe and even more in ’26. I mean, in ’27 because it’s end of twenty six contract, which we have a point to to really play. And by then, if you think about it, we also have RSV flu, COVID plus flu, so the ability to grow and compete. So if you and then we have good position in Taiwan, South Korea.

So if you look at the world in term of growth, because we’re obsessed about growing the top line again, I already believe that 2025 is gonna be our lowest point in term of sales. And then we go into ’26 with what I talked about in those three countries where we have factories and the availability of twelve eighty three and potentially the flu plus COVID combo and or flu in The US in ’26. You could see ’26 with growth and ’27 with even faster growth. And then there’s also the INT product, which is why I transitioned to a pipeline. You know, we’re finishing to get with flu mono and flu plus COVID, finishing the respiratory job to get the whole portfolio.

Then we have R and D. As you know, we’ve said that based on the shape of the enrollment curve of phase three in melanoma for R and D with our colleagues at Merck, We should see the data for phase three in melanoma in ’26. The factory, as we said, is ready, and so it will not be critical path, so we should have a launch in ’27. And then there’s norovirus. Norovirus, like any of those virus where you have to guess the epidemiology when you run your phase three study, is set up as a two season study like the flu study.

We don’t know yet if we’re going to hit in one season or if we’re going need two season. So there’s a potential ’26 or ’27 launch. Again, we’ll see when we look at the data. So CMV, we should get the phase three data this year. So if you look at the whole portfolio and you just look at one or two years out, I don’t think it’s hard to see growth and then a lot of growth because, of course, we have no patent expiry on your topic, so you’re gonna see a lot of growth.

Look at the next five to ten years, you’re gonna see a lot of growth starting in ’26 and then accelerating. Diversification of sales away from COVID, which I think will give a lot of people a bit of of encouragement because people have had a lot of anxiety in terms of whether COVID stabilize before potentially COVID grows. Because we should not forget that we also have some tailwinds for us in terms of respiratory virus, which is the world is getting older. As we know, age is a is a risk factor for respiratory virus hospitalization and deaths. And as people because a lot of scientific skepticism and anti vaxxer sentiment, as you get less people vaccinated, virus are also gonna spread faster.

And so if you have this this combination of virus spreading faster, because even in community, young people not getting vaccinated, of course, increase the spread of a virus, and more people that are older age, and you see this over the next couple of years and you compound this, we think we’re gonna have some tailwind there. So I think policy is stabilizing. I think we’ve seen the worst of headlines in terms of what concerns us, and then reacceleration of the business. And then maybe to go to your last piece is cost, which, as I said, for us, is really important. We have resized the company tremendously, and we’re not done.

So if you look at it, last year, we had $6,300,000,000 of cash cost. We’ve guided this year for $5,500,000,000 next year, 4,700,000,000.0, and the year after, 4.2 If you look at it, in q one, we are down 19% year over year cash cost, and we are ahead of plan. And if you do some modeling, you could see that it’s possible that we’re gonna do better than 5.5. We’re keeping 5.5 as a guidance for now. We’ll update it as appropriate as we move forward and as we know more.

But we are very focused on cost, and it goes through a lot of things, streamlining the pipeline. So we stop program, we pause, like we talked about the latency, we pause programs. He goes about driving productivity, working very hard to discuss with suppliers. So we’ve hired an amazing head of procurement eighteen months ago, and we have really worked very diligently with Jamie, our CFO, and with the team across the board. We’ve already saved hundreds of millions of dollars just on better negotiation at same volume.

We’ve reduced the volume as I talked about. So we’re doing a lot of work also with technology and AI, spending a lot of time to drive productivity with AI. Just one of the new feature that was just launched recently on GPT Enterprise is the ability to use unstructured data. So you can use now data in your email. You can use data that are on OneDrive or data that are on SharePoint.

And so ability to just accelerate that, I think we have up to 2,000 GPTs across the company. So we we there’s no silver bullet, but we’re just looking at everything, and we are not done. And I’m gonna work really hard to actually do better than those targets.

Unidentified speaker: To follow-up on some of the points that you just raised, are you still, you know, right sized, I guess, or just, you know, confident here with the goal of returning to profitability by 2028?

Stephane Benzel, CEO, Moderna: Correct. Because our current plan, as I told you, I’m gonna work really hard to beat the plan, is to deliver $4,200,000,000 of cash cost in 2027. So if you look at the trajectory of the cost, that could mean similar or even lower cost in ’28. We’ll see as we have closed up, but now we’re working on the 4.2 for 2027 and working hard to beat it. Then let’s talk about the top line, because, of course, the other side of your question for profitability.

If you look at the midpoint of our guidance this year, 2,000,000,000. As we just spoke about, we’re having in ’26 the Canada, UK, Australia coming fully online. That could be a billion dollar of sales. Look at The US last year, we had $1,700,000,000, but we had $200,000,000 of returns. So that’s 1.5.

If you assume no growth in The US just on COVID, because you know there was almost no RISE, but we’re gonna start to see RISE growth, and then twelve eighty three and then the new product. So if you look at 1.5 in The US and you look at already one outside The US where they had 2.5, assuming no new products, no IT, no nothing. And then there’s Europe, as we talked about, that’s coming back online a little bit more in ’25, little bit more in ’26, and a lot in ’27. As you can assume, there are some countries that are not so happy that they’ve been locked into a single contract. Especially, as you know, there’s been a lot of real world evidence post COVID showing that Spikevax in the the real world has higher efficacy, less hospitalization than the Pfizer product.

And so you can understand there’s been a lot of hospital, a lot of doctors, oncologists, very upset for a few years that Nick could not give what they thought was the highest efficacy vaccine to their patients. And so I believe that we should get a fair share in Europe from 01/01/2027. So if you look at those timelines, we’ve a launch of And then there’s also neuro and CMV. CMV, as we said, should be a slow launch because we have to build the market.

And initially, the indication should be 16 for women before they get pregnant, but in the age of having a child. And so it’s going to take a bit of time, but norovirus could be a pretty quick commercial ramp. As you know, norovirus is not a fun virus to get. You have, again, the population at high risk we talked about, 18 plus high risk, elderly. But have, you know, nursing home, when you have, you a lot of older people in the community, somebody gets sick, the whole community gets sick.

You have the same thing in kindergarten, so you have also an interest for children, which will take us time to get the animal vaccine. But the educators, If you do focus group with educators, if you do focus group with health care professional, nurses, doctors, after all, they will want an oral virus vaccine, and we will be the only one to have one. So if you think about our commercial strategy in The US in the retail segment, portfolio, as we have been saying, is key. Last year, we suffered at being a mono product company because RSV came so late. So now we have RSV and we have, you know, M next spike.

That’s why waiting for the new higher efficacy products for COVID. So as you think about flu and then flu plus COVID and then neuro, we could be the company with the most interesting portfolio from a profitability standpoint to the retail channel. And as we know, Walgreens is going private. CVS is having financial challenges. And so all the you know, right at bankruptcy.

So if you look at all of those, they need profitability. And as you know, vaccine is highly profitable business. Sometimes they lose money because of PBMs on the drugs, prescription drugs, but vaccine between the administration fee that they get from the payers and the discount that they get from the manufacturers is a very profitable business for retail pharmacies. And so we think that we’re going to build in the next two years, most probably the most exciting portfolio for the retailers, which give us negotiation leverage with the retailers.

Unidentified speaker: With regard to the 2025 revenue guidance that you just cited, what are the risks to achieving this guide?

Stephane Benzel, CEO, Moderna: Yes. So I would say the risks are, of course, in U. As I said, if you took last year normalized for returns, 1,500,000,000.0, how much is the market reduced? And will it be reduced? Going back to what we talked about the new policy and new framework from the commissioner and the head of CBER.

It’s interesting to look at this spring. This spring, as you know, there’s a recommendation for booster for people at high risk. If you look at the data over the last eight, ten weeks, it’s actually on par, or some weeks even better, like last week as an example is but you have several weeks, but it’s better than last year. And it’s important to understand for context, this happened with no CDC promotion. This one of the things that the CDC canceled under the new administration.

There was no advertising, nothing. Look at last year, there were radio ads run by the CDC. There were ads in clinics, in doctor’s office, and so on. This did not happen this year. They canceled all the budget for promotion.

So despite that, you had people who understand they are at risk, who went to get their vaccine. And so that makes us, I would say, cautiously optimistic. Again, we want to be careful because the season is ahead of us, not behind us, that if the time is similar, we should have similar level of sales. There might be a bit of pressure on price. There might be a bit of pressure on market share.

So we’ll see again. But this is in the guidance. So again, because the 1.5 is the bottom of a global guidance, with 1.5 in The U. S. Being the number of last year, net of returns, we think that we have put those into a guidance.

Another risk is those three countries, they need the factories to be approved by the local authorities to start shipping. So everything is currently on track. The teams are working really hard, but because we depend on the regulators to review, inspect, and approve those facility, every week delay is gonna reduce the sales. So, of course, we put some buffer into the guidance. So it’s a it’s a broad range this year because there’s just so many uncertainties on the downside.

So that’s another thing, but you can it will be a one off. It will not have impact on ’26, but you have potentially an impact on where we are in terms of the guidance of 1.5 to 2.5. I think those are the two biggest risks we see.

Unidentified speaker: Just given the fact that you can take this technology and go extremely broad, how are you thinking about BD and partnerships on the forward? But also, you yourselves, would you are you going to continue to stick with mRNA as a modality, or are you thinking about even going beyond that?

Stephane Benzel, CEO, Moderna: So it’s a great question. So let’s start by the latter one. So at this stage, we’re sticking with mRNA just because if you look at our industry, the hardest thing to do in this industry is to come with drug, Right? An innovative drug that adds value to the doctors and create, as a consequence, a return for shareholders. We have an abundance of drugs.

A lot of other companies look at our big pharma colleagues. They figure out what do they do when all those drugs expire. Because we’re a new company, new technology, because we’ve been so aggressive in filing IP, we have an we have 40 drugs in the clinic right now, four zero. Our biggest challenge is to be disciplined about the cash and the investment, which is why we are putting on ice right now the phase three investment for the latent portfolio. But as I mentioned, we are working actively with pharma company on the one hand and financial partner on the other hand because we want those products to get to phase three.

We want to sell those products. I don’t need to build in a factory for them. I can use Norwood because plus those virus being latent, being DNA based, they are very stable. They don’t rotate easily. So I can make those off season.

I literally could we could launch literally launch EBV without adding $1 of CapEx. We could launch HSV without adding $1 of CapEx. We could launch VCV sampling without adding $1 of CapEx. I mean, you get the story. And so we are very actively talking to partners, potential partners right now.

What we’re always doing is we want to figure out who is the best partner in terms of capabilities and in terms of value. You know, we have $8,500,000,000 of cash. So we would rather wait a few months to get the best partnership than being in a hurry and and destroy value for shareholders by being in a hurry. Because, we have $8,500,000,000. We have years we have cash for many years to come, and we believe the the the cash balance would take us because of the math we run to to profitability.

But, yes, we’re actively active in BD, both with pharma, US and outside The US company, as well as financial partners.

Unidentified speaker: I want to delve into some of the changes that have played out on the regulatory side here. So one is we saw the news about ACIP, the CDC’s ACIP here, and it’d be great to get your thoughts there and how that impacts you. But also, just given the regulatory framework and CDC guidelines with regard to, you know, the healthy children and pregnant women as well as the need to run a randomized placebo controlled trial. Just put this in context for us on the impact, but also help us understand how it impacts your R and D spend on the FORWARD when you have to run these placebo controlled studies.

Stephane Benzel, CEO, Moderna: Sure. So we start by the end because it’s pretty easy. For December, one of the thing we discussed with the agency is to run the placebo controlled because the phase three for everybody might not be familiar like you are, is we run it head to head to Spikevax, which was agreed with the FDA when we started that phase three, because as you know, this is how things have been done previously. We will manage the portfolio to have no impact on cost. As you know, we have big portfolio with big R and D budget, so we’ll manage it.

You know, it’s so to to your other questions, I think for HSIP, it’s too early to tell. As you know, the announcement came on Monday or Wednesday morning. I think we’ll have to figure to see who is appointed to the committee. The piece we’ll have to see is what is the process and what is the disclosure and transparency about decision making. And the thing that for us is really fundamental is, look, all vaccines have shown great data on efficacy, great data on safety.

So we’re going to this new context with confidence. We’re going to, of course, figure out and observe like everybody else. But I think it’s too early to have an opinion on what this is going to look like precisely. As we talked about look. We just got a product approved ten days ago by the FDA.

A lot of people believed over the last few months and sentiment that I perceived it was getting worse, that we will not get twelve eighty three approved. And we got it approved, not only approved, but it was approved on PDUFA date, which is a lot of other drugs in other disease area, which you will think, from the headline standpoint, are higher on the FDA priority list to get approved that have missed their PDUFA date. So at the working team level, as Steve and Hogg mentioned on the Q1 earnings call, at the working team levels, our teams are very active with FDA counterparts. They are both working really hard to be able to answer the question that the FDA teams have to answer them whether it’s CMC or clinical data or safety or anything that they have constructively, like it has been the case in the past get done. So I would say we are we are we are working with the agency constructively, and we always will like we always have.

We’ve done the same over the world, which is knowing this business, you have one regulator per country. And, like, you know, the airplane makers, have the FAA, and and banks have their own regulators. And you work with your regulator, and and you work for things. There’s a lot of dedicated people at FDA that are working using science as their North Star and using data to make decision.

Unidentified speaker: I wanna pivot over to the portfolio that you have and and the upcoming datasets. Maybe to start here, the the INT program. Walk us through the timelines for this portfolio as to when we’ll get some data sets to inform not just melanoma, but other indications as well.

Stephane Benzel, CEO, Moderna: That’s a great question. So if you look at what we are trying to do with our partners at Merck with INT is, I would say, and starts with a lot of humility, it’s kind of a playbook of what they’ve done on ketoglu, which is, as we know, immuno oncology has revolutionized cancer care and helped so many people over time. And we think it’s the beginning of that new field of treating cancer. And given the signal we have seen in melanoma in the Phase II, which as you know, was randomized, whereas you know, the p value and the hazard ratio was pretty exciting. And as you know, the KEYTRUDA only arm was very similar to the cathedral phase three study, so this was kind of real.

We believe very much so. And so what we’ve done with our colleagues at Merck is to say, look, this is not an accident. This is real, and we need to change that signal. And so we’ve started a lot of study in addition to melanoma, including a phase three for lung. We also studied kidney, in bladder cancer.

As we said publicly, we are very interested. We’ll share the news when it’s right time to do so, but we are very interested to try R and T as a monotherapy earlier in disease. Because as we all know, as you grow earlier in disease, patients have a much stronger immune system, disease is of course less spread. And as you recall, because I know you’ve followed the company for a long time, as you recall in 2018, pre COVID, when nobody really paid attention to IND at ASCO, we showed interesting data in lung, in melanoma, in a few of the tumor types as monotherapy, because it was a basket study like you start oncology studies. And so we want to chase that signal.

And so I think INT is going to really be go across tumor types, go earlier in time. And so once we start to get next year the big phase three data on melanoma, I think after I wouldn’t be surprised here every six month ish, you start to see a rolling, like, flow, very constant of new data on different studies. We are extremely committed to this program. Our colleagues at Merck are also extremely committed to this program. So there’s a lot more discussion that the teams are having right now that’s not public yet.

I will announce new indications. So I think, again, saying that with humanity, a KTGRA playbook is a bit how people should think about how we and Merck are going to invest beyond high and T. And that’s for patient in stage two, three. As I said, we want to go to stage one early where IO is not really used because there’s too much toxicity. Think one thing that sometimes people forget is the safety profile of INT is really spectacular.

For those who don’t know the technology, it’s exactly the same technology or what we use for infectious disease vaccine. So that’s a pretty spectacular product. Think about an IT monotherapy that people could use as stage one with a safety profile of infectious disease vaccine. Well, if we could get a shot as intramuscular and on your way to work, that would be such a change for the care of those patients. And if you look at another product that we started to talk more about on the Q1 call, our Checkpoint product, that is a treatment that we own, this is not a partner product, that we shared some early data, dose escalation data, last year at ESMO that were quite exciting, of course early.

What we shared in the Q1 call is that we are quite intrigued by the signal we have seen so far, because we’ve seen more than what, of course, we showed ASMR last year, we showed more this year. And so we are basically accelerating the phase two enrollment for that program. And that program is used in stage four patient, and the data that we have seen that gives us hope is for patients that have failed over checkpoints. So again, it’s very early, but just kind of give you a sense of the importance of a pipeline, that we are not a COVID-nineteen company. We also have very exciting drugs in oncology.

And we are really, from a strategic standpoint, as I said in my intro, we are really deploying the cash that is being jointed by the respiratory vaccine as we do those phase ones only once and generating the cash flow into oncology and over disease like rare disease and potentially autoimmune soon.

Unidentified speaker: And just to touch on CMV as well, you know, your confidence here around this update that we’re going to see.

Stephane Benzel, CEO, Moderna: So we we remain optimistic about CMV. I always want to be careful. This is a product in phase three for which I’m blinded to, so I don’t know the outcome. I will just go back to a few things. We know through our work across you go back through data, through the COVID data in terms of T cell activation, CD4 and CD8, we know through the work we showed on VZV compared to Shingrix, again, on CD4, CD8 showing same or even better performance than Shingrix, which is known to be a very durable vaccine for a latent virus.

If you look at our phase two data, we’ve shown up to three years of duration of antibodies, which of course is not efficacy, but the antibodies are very, very stable at the same level as antibody of people that have been infected naturally that are CMV positive. So, of course, given there’s never been a successful CMV vaccine in the world, we don’t know where the bar is. A bit like if you recall during COVID in 2020 when all those clinical trial study was going, everybody was using antibody levels of people naturally infected as the benchmark of a target. So we’ll see. There’s a massive medical need for CMV.

There’s around twenty thousand kids in The US every year that have birth defect due to CMV disease. We believe there are some miscarriages that are due to CMV. And so everybody has tried to do a vaccine, everybody has failed. We think we have the right biology. The phase two data is very encouraging.

The other data points on the platform, IND, I don’t talk about IND, but IND only works because of T cell, right? So fingers crossed, but we remain optimistic about CMV, and we really want this product to be to make it because people need it.

Unidentified speaker: Great. Well, with that, Stephane, thank you so much.

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