Novavax at BofA Securities: Strategic Growth and Partnerships

On Wednesday, 14 May 2025, Novavax Inc. (NASDAQ:NVAX) participated in the BofA Securities 2025 Healthcare Conference, highlighting its strategic transformation from a small biotech to a significant player in the vaccine market. The conference showcased both the company’s promising partnerships and ongoing challenges, such as regulatory hurdles and market dynamics.

Key Takeaways

• Novavax is transitioning from a small biotech to a company leveraging partnerships and R&D for growth.
• The relationship with Sanofi is pivotal for potential profitability by 2027.
• Regulatory discussions with the FDA are ongoing, focusing on post-marketing commitments.
• The company aims to capitalize on COVID-19 vaccine market trends and broader vaccine platforms.
• Financial discipline and cost reduction are central to Novavax’s future strategy.

Financial Results

• Novavax reaffirmed its expense guidance and emphasized a pathway toward breakeven and profitability by 2027.
• The company has reduced its liabilities by 80% and plans further reductions in R&D and SG&A expenses by 80-85% compared to 2022, targeting around $250 million by 2027.

Operational Updates

• The partnership with Sanofi is a cornerstone for growth, with the transfer of Nuvaxavid ownership to Sanofi being a key development.
• An updated agreement with Takeda and the potential of Matrix M for partnerships in oncology and other vaccine platforms were discussed.
• Seasonal updates for COVID vaccines were highlighted, with references to the upcoming VRBPAC meeting and the importance of immune response measurements.

Future Outlook

• Novavax executives expressed confidence in their strategic initiatives and technological advancements.
• The company is positioned to capitalize on the evolving COVID-19 vaccine market, particularly the shift toward consumer choice and vaccine tolerability.
• Strategic partnerships and the expansion of collaborations leveraging the Matrix M adjuvant platform are expected to drive future growth.

Q&A Highlights

• Analyst Alex Stranahan’s Q&A session provided clarity on regulatory pathways and market dynamics.
• Concerns about media confusion regarding the BLA approval process were addressed, with an emphasis on post-marketing commitments.
• The leadership team discussed the evolving dynamics of the COVID-19 vaccine market and strategic priorities.

In conclusion, for a detailed understanding of Novavax’s strategic direction and future plans, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript.

Full transcript - BofA Securities 2025 Healthcare Conference:

Alex Stranahan, Senior Biotech Analyst, Bank of America: Joining day two of the twenty twenty five Bank of America Healthcare Conference. My name is Alex Stranahan, senior biotech analyst covering Novavax at Bank of America, And I’m very pleased to be joined by many members of the senior leadership team at Novavax, including John Jacobs, president and chief executive officer Jim Kelly, chief financial officer and Roxandra Adragia Ackley, head of r and d, who’s who’s a recent joiner to the team. So we’ve got thirty minutes on the clock. Maybe, John, if you wanna sort of tee up the discussion, and then we can, you know, jump into the.

John Jacobs, President and Chief Executive Officer, Novavax: Absolutely. And we we were joking a little bit out front, but Roxandra also has a PhD in several other accolades of credibility that couldn’t even fit on the slide as well as Jim. So I am who I am, but these two are underplayed on the slide. So glad to be on the team with both. For hosting us yet again this year.

Hard to believe it’s been a year since our landmark Sanofi deal for the company, but boy, have we been busy in that time and even in the last quarter. So we’ve we’ve taken the company from from an organization that was originally a small biotech and then through the pandemic launched its first product. And I joined the company and we’ve really changed the whole fabric of the organization from our expense profile to the to the people and the structure that we have, the leadership team, and our focus and strategy, most importantly, post Sanofi, has been to leverage the technology platform that we have, which has proven at a global scale through our COVID vaccine, through the r twenty one vaccine, and now through a four to 5,000,000 patient database on our adjuvant matrix m showing safety and effectiveness there with that particular tech to a company that’s now looking to grow through partnering and r and d, early stage r and d with four new programs launched in the last quarter under the leadership of Roxandra and her team. Right? We have a late stage assets in kick and flu where we’re seeking a partner.

We continue to explore more deeply the Sanofi partnership. And we announced just in the first quarter ’2 new MTA arrangements, one with an original partner, Top ten Pharma, where we expanded their MTA with Matrix M to include viral antigens that they’re exploring with now, and added a second Top ten Pharma experimenting with our Matrix M in their lab, extended our Takeda contract with better economics for Novavax and a win win for both companies post pandemic, as well as an agreement with an oncology company to explore the utility of our matrix in their oncology platform assets. Very exciting news. We keep adding to that ability to potentially partner much more broadly than Sanofi, which we saw as a starting point, not the finish of what we intend to be more to come.

Alex Stranahan, Senior Biotech Analyst, Bank of America: Okay. Great. Well, maybe we could start with, you know, the updates that we saw in the one q call. Got some clarity around APAs, which benefited the the top line in the quarter and also, you know, led to the, you know, the guidance raise as well. Maybe just walk us through sort of the key updates from from from the print that you’d, you know, single up.

John Jacobs, President and Chief Executive Officer, Novavax: Well, certainly, as you said it, and then some of those numbers, a lot of those numbers weren’t direct cash. They were cash that we’d received in prior periods, but now accounted for from a from a GAAP perspective. So we took the guidance up. Importantly, the core of our guidance for this year on expenses remains. And as Jim Kelly made very clear, we have a pathway toward potential breakeven and profitability as early as 2027, and that’s just through what we have with our Sanofi relationship alone on either a single milestone and or potential royalties from one of the several assets that they have in development with them now.

Right? And then we talked about our revenue guidance primarily based upon our BLA milestone from Sanofi this year. And the two license transfers for both The US and Europe that would go to Sanofi associated with that BLA approval and European approvals of our product. We’re on track for those. I know it’s been hard to follow.

The news is so vibrant and changes on a daily basis, lots of exciting things happening politically and in biotech, etcetera. We remain very confident. I mean, we’ve been in touch with FDA. We’ve heard from them formally. We responded to their information request or IR for short, and we’re waiting for their final response.

Once we get alignment on a post marketing commitment, not requirement, but a commitment, which is less stringent than a requirement to generate some additional data, We believe then our file is approvable. It was approvable before. It remains approvable. But we have a pathway to that approval upon alignment with the parameters of how we’ll generate that data. And we’re in those discussions right now.

So we fully anticipate and look forward to potentially getting that approval in the near term and being on the market this fall with the other competitors.

Alex Stranahan, Senior Biotech Analyst, Bank of America: Right. And I think the key the other keyword within that is post marketing Correct. Which has been a point of confusion in the media and, you know, with investors as well. So I guess just simply the the expectation is this would be post BLA.

John Jacobs, President and Chief Executive Officer, Novavax: Correct. No. That’s well said, Alec. I think there were some other comments made by new leaders who were on social media making comments that might have been misinterpreted unintentionally as we had to do something prior to potentially getting the approval. But inherently, as you say, a post marketing commitment is is achieved post marketing.

And post approval, you need the approval to then formally market the product, then you would generate the data. And, look, it’s not uncommon at all for any company to have post marketing commitments, requirements, data generation requests from the FDA. It’s actually a good thing to keep learning about these products and to deliver more data over time. That’s not unusual at all. What was unusual about this was just really the timing of it and the way it came about.

We just happened to be there the first day the new administration took control of FDA with our approval date. So that is what it is. But we’re working with the FDA. We plan on partnering with them, generating the data, and look forward to our BLA approval. That’s our intention.

Alex Stranahan, Senior Biotech Analyst, Bank of America: Okay. And and maybe it’d be helpful just to revisit the data that you have that’s that supported the EUA for Nuvaxaved and and maybe what the other BLA approved COVID vaccines have had to show to attain their own BLAs.

John Jacobs, President and Chief Executive Officer, Novavax: So why don’t I refer to Roxandra here? Rox, maybe you want to address the robust nature of our existing dataset for Nuvaxibed.

Roxandra Adragia Ackley, Head of R&D, Novavax: Yeah, thank you for the question. And as you know, we have undertaken a placebo controlled trial for nuvaxibid. We’ve enrolled something like 30,000 individuals in that particular trial. And we have seen our data which indicated that the vaccine is safe and effective in that particular study population. So as a consequence, we do believe that based on the data, our vaccine is approvable.

Of course, as John was mentioning, we always have to learn. The vast majority, practically all of the vaccines that have been approved as of lately have this type of post marketing commitments that are attached to them. That is something very normal. We really need to generate more data as a field. I’m not talking only about the COVID vaccines, but really in all the other vaccines that would inform us, would inform, you know, the population where that particular vaccine is more useful.

Maybe an extended label if that is something that is under discussion. So there are many things where we can actually learn from these post marketing commitments. Okay.

Alex Stranahan, Senior Biotech Analyst, Bank of America: That makes sense. Maybe one question we’ve received, and maybe this feeds back to sort of the changing perspectives within leadership at the FDA and elsewhere is, you know, what do you guys think about the seasonal updates? This has been standard for decades in flu. It’s what’s been happening in COVID too. Do you anticipate any change of tone around that?

I mean, that’s kind of what it requires to stay up to date for the the evolvement.

John Jacobs, President and Chief Executive Officer, Novavax: Look. I think the best arbiter for that will be what we see next week at VRBPAC. So next Thursday, I’d encourage anyone who’s interested in the space to to listen in on the VRBPAC meeting and see what recommendations are made. And then ultimately, where CDC and the authorities line up on their final recommendation. I mean, we know in other markets, age based and disease based recommendations have already been made in COVID and are currently made with many vaccines.

So if you have underlying conditions, if you’re 65 or older, etcetera, you should consider getting vaccinated. Right? If you’re relatively healthy and have no underlying conditions, depending on the state of a disease, the severity of that season, you may not need to, and that’s up to the authorities each year to change their mind. Now if you’re asking about the methodologies available to any pharma company and the state of science as it stands today in the modern era on how we can measure these things, then you’re looking at immune response as the foundational principle there. So each time you get mutated viruses on a seasonal viral infection, guys, right, you measure the human immune response to that.

And there’s a there’s a there’s a tree, and then there are branches. Right? So if you have a j n one family, for instance, of COVID viruses, and they’re mutating off of that j n one with a couple of different proteins, then you measure your j n one vaccine and maybe other branch vaccines against that to see what’s most effective or still meets the bar for minimum effectiveness at least. If a tree jumps or you get a very different variant with completely different sets of protein or a vast amount of protein that’s different, you may need to tweak the formulation of your vaccine. But it’s the really the same vaccine.

You’re just changing the target protein in alignment with that, Roxandra. Right? And that’s the way it’s done with flu, that’s the way it’s been done with COVID.

Roxandra Adragia Ackley, Head of R&D, Novavax: So if we are looking at the data that has been generated both in The United States and globally, we we can note that the COVID variants have been replaced by newer variants or evolving somewhere between fourteen and twenty eight weeks of circulating in a population. The same thing, maybe a little bit longer, is happening with the flu strains, but we’ve seen they’re evolving really every year, and as a consequence the vaccines will need to be adapted in function of the circulating variants. And sometimes there are variants that are much more conserved, as John was mentioning. Let’s say that tree, the gen one is an example, the seasons while or some of the flu strains, well some can be very, very different. And then one needs to look at including these new variants in their vaccines.

John Jacobs, President and Chief Executive Officer, Novavax: Perhaps a question behind the question, Alec, we’ve heard from some investors we’ve met, but there seems to be confusion around what’s actually being asked for. This isn’t specific to Novavax, just in general. Are are the authorities saying, hey, well, there needs to be a full blown efficacy study every single season. That’s that’s not feasible in our opinion. And then you should ask other former executives as well.

But knowing as we do vaccine development, it’s not feasible. By the time you got a strain and would do a full blown efficacy study with thousands of patients, the season would be over, and it would be mutating again to something else. So you’d be in a perpetual loop of constantly assessing effectiveness, and then by the time you knew it was effective, you know it’s effective by the immunity already, by the way. But showing it through that different measure, you’d already be on to the next mutation. And so you’d be in endless loop almost like a twilight zone of never having any vaccine.

So that’s why flu measures immunity. So it’s not practical. It’s not economically feasible. And you would you would essentially be saying you have a vaccine or not is our interpretation of that potential scenario. But we’re not hearing that being asked for.

You know, we received our information request from FDA to generate some additional data after licensure. That’s not an unreasonable request, and we think we can manage that. So

Alex Stranahan, Senior Biotech Analyst, Bank of America: Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. And, you know, I think along those same lines, we’ve heard comments from Prasad and and others around, you know, the requirement or the the age requirement for boosters with COVID. I think I’ve that floated around.

I’d be curious to to know if you’ve already seen kind of a natural gravitation for maybe more exposed patient groups or, you know, elderly individuals, immune immune compromised individuals that are already kind of naturally comprising the the market for COVID vax boosters today. Anything you’re

John Jacobs, President and Chief Executive Officer, Novavax: seeing correct. It’s over 50% of the market is 65. And you have Jim and Rux of the stats. It’s fifty fifty and up make the vast majority of the market. Right?

Jim Kelly, Chief Financial Officer, Novavax: That’s right. Each Rux, you you’ve got some great information about below 50. Who actually is getting vaccinated? Yeah.

Roxandra Adragia Ackley, Head of R&D, Novavax: So the the percentage of the absolute percentage of the population that is getting vaccinated. So, instance, in less than 18 years of age is last year was about fourteen percent, sixteen percent. In the 18 50 to 40 nine actually, it’s about thirty six percent. And of course, there is a percentage of the population that is immunocompromised that has at least one risk factor of developing severe disease. And there is a very long list of that one factor on the side of the CDC, including one which everyone is very familiar with, which is a BMI of higher than 30, which actually is characteristics of much of The US population.

So we do believe that that would be the population underneath 60 five that are going to get predominantly vaccinated.

John Jacobs, President and Chief Executive Officer, Novavax: So a couple of ways to look at it, right, what Rex was describing was the percentage of a particular age cohort that is choosing to get vaccinated. And then if we take that hat off, that speaks to opportunity and rationale, which is very important to know. And then if I’m an investor, I’m looking at the other hat, which is, okay, so what does that mean market size wise? Right? So the vast majority of the market, if we put on that other hat and think about it through a different lens, which is of those who have received the vaccine in the last two years, what proportion would be in that sixty five plus?

And then that at least one underlying factor up to up to sixty four. That’s the vast majority The majority of the market is not your 17 year old lacrosse star, and she’s super healthy and eats organic food and runs into CBS to get six vaccines. Right? So the majority of your market are 65 and or people with underlying conditions and and really are advised by their doctor and together wanna go get a vaccine.

And, you know, those are some of the recommendations we’ve already seen in Europe and other markets. And if The US happens to go that way, that’s still the majority in our opinion of the the market opportunity here for COVID.

Alex Stranahan, Senior Biotech Analyst, Bank of America: Okay. No. That’s that’s very interesting. You know? And it’s it’s great to get your perspective.

Obviously, you guys are uniquely positioned to to comment on some of these things. But I wanna kinda shift the focus back to Novavax as a company, you know, what’s going on internally. Maybe walk us through sort of the the process of transferring ownership over Nuvaxavir to to Sanofi as the year goes on as we head into the next season just logistically.

John Jacobs, President and Chief Executive Officer, Novavax: Yeah. Sure. I mean, of course, they they took the lead formally in the beginning of this year. But, you know, technically, then you still have to we wanna get the BLA, have it under full licensure, and we intend to do so as we’ve said publicly. And then hand the license for The US market over to them, the MAH transfer, which is associated with a $25,000,000 1 time milestone payment, as well as that MAH or that license transfer for Europe, which is another $25,000,000 milestone association.

So the BLA earns us $1.75, and then those two license handovers to Sanofi are worth another 50. So that’s $2.25 cash coming into our company that we would earn through those events. Then technically, Sanofi, you know, for for a given year, the the year the season really starts the year before, as you know, Alec. Right? So having a product that’s under full licensure, having a product that has the right shelf life, having a product that’s all in the right presentation like a prefilled syringe, not just in The US but in all markets, sets the full stage.

So what Sanofi has said in ’25 is it’s a learning year. Right? They’re getting the product, but they’re we’re still waiting for the BLA. We’re still filing for shelf life extensions and other things as Novavax still has those components on our side of the fence that we’re wrapping up. So as they get into the twenty six, twenty seven season, that will be the first time that the Sanofi team has their hands on the wheel, proverbially of the ship with all of the pieces together.

Right? The presentation, all of the filings done, full licensure which allows for marketing campaign, and the ability to start the retail negotiations as the lead which start the fall prior to the next season all the way in advance. So their first time that they’ll have the full machinery at their disposal with all of the right pieces and they can operate 100% independently in these markets would be for next year’s season, not this year’s season. This year will be a partial where we hope to get that BLA to those license transfers and there’s some engagement there, then they carry it through the fall as they’re already preparing for the full 2627 effort.

Alex Stranahan, Senior Biotech Analyst, Bank of America: Okay. That all that all makes sense. And, you know, you recently announced your updated agreement with Takeda as well. How does this you know, maybe walk us through, you know, the updated terms here, and how does this maybe exemplify in one embodiment of how you’re trying to drive, you know, value from from the platform?

John Jacobs, President and Chief Executive Officer, Novavax: Yeah. Jim, did you wanna answer that one?

Jim Kelly, Chief Financial Officer, Novavax: Oh, certainly. I think one of the most important things about this updated agreement is one, Japanese market, third largest health care market in the world. So this is an exceptionally important both partner and market where we want our our COVID vaccine and vaccine available. With respect to where we were was we we had a pandemic era type of contract that needed to logically move and be more of an endemic. And we had agreement with our our partner that something had to change, and that’s what this amendment is.

It was just making this agreement fit for purpose, all the right incentives, so that Takeda was incentivized, and we were as well, to make them as successful as possible. So therefore, what happens? 20,000,000 upfront. We’ll book that in the second quarter. Under the agreement, we’re gonna be eligible each year that they get approval to market the product, 10 up to 10,000,000 more in milestone payments.

And then instead of a profit share model, a model where you take revenue minus certain cost and split them up, regular royalty model. And all three of these are far more traditional More in line with the

John Jacobs, President and Chief Executive Officer, Novavax: Sanofi deal. With Sanofi deal.

Jim Kelly, Chief Financial Officer, Novavax: But what what we think is important here is you continue to see major pharma players wanna access our technology.

Alex Stranahan, Senior Biotech Analyst, Bank of America: I mean, there’s a limited number of, you know, approved and validated COVID vaccines. Right? And I think you’ve got great validation for Matrix M from that. Right? Yeah.

Maybe you could talk sort of on the Matrix M side, you know, what kind of fertile ground is there for for partnerships there? I know Sanofi is leveraging that for for some of their programs as well.

John Jacobs, President and Chief Executive Officer, Novavax: Yeah. A few things we announced, and then I’d like Rox, maybe you can comment on, you know, the platform utility of Matrix and other elements that you’re researching in oncology, etcetera. From a from a perspective of partnering out, you know, first, the Sanofi deal itself, which you mentioned. So, you know, they had licensed our an asset we made from our tech platform in our COVID vaccine. They’re intending to make new assets combining that vaccine with their own flu vaccines in the form of combination vaccines.

They’ve too fast tracked in phase one two studies now. What you’re alluding to on Matrix M, our adjuvant platform, Sanofi has unfettered access to that. So for every new vaccine they may develop, above and beyond their combo they’ve made with our COVID vaccine and their flu vaccine, which is separate and and related to its own milestones. Any new vaccine, they take matrix, they add it to x y z antigen, they make a new vaccine. We’re eligible for up to 200,000,000 in milestones and then mid single digit royalties for two decades post launch for each individual asset they may make using matrix m.

None of those are exclusive. It’s it’s a nonexclusive license. So we could therefore then take Matrix M and out license it to any competitor, any other company we want to, or take it ourselves, copy exactly what they’re doing, and move forward with it. So we have freedom to operate, and they have unfettered access to it to work on expanding their own portfolio, which is pretty exciting. We also announced two MTAs.

I think we talked about that just a bit earlier, but one with a big top 10 pharma by by global revenue measurement last year who came and expanded that MTA to now experiment with viral antigens as well as bacterial antigens. It was just bacterial before. So that’s an expanded experimentation in their own lab with their own portfolio in matrix to see what’s possible. We had a second top 10 pharma by revenue definition globally come to us and sign an MTA. They are also separately experimenting with Matrix seven, their portfolio.

We signed a deal with an oncology company to combine Matrix with their asset, and Rux can talk a little bit more about the utility of Matrix itself, which we’ve been building evidence and data around to show how it has utility across multiple platforms, Rakshin?

Roxandra Adragia Ackley, Head of R&D, Novavax: Yes. So to the point of an approved vaccine, actually we do have matrix in r twenty one, which is a malaria vaccine that has been introduced in endemic countries as of last year. And in 2025, the plans are to introduce it in approximately 15 countries. So encouraging. That is based on another collaboration more on academic side, so is University of Oxford and Serum.

But there it is very important because the study population and the population in which it is introduced is as young as five months of age. And the clinical trials were five to thirty six months of age. So we are getting that tolerability reactogenicity profile not only in adult population but in this very young pediatric population. To the point that John was making, we have actually experimented, and I had the opportunity to present at the World Vaccine Conference with matrix and in conjunction with different vaccine platforms. Very different.

So we are using a protein based vaccine nanoparticles, but we’ve experimented with things at various, you know, inactivated vaccine, polysaccharide vaccines, VLPs, virions, adenoviruses. And part of my presentation at the World Vaccine Conference was that particular long list with the references with either the preclinical or the clinical trials in those areas. So by and large, do we believe that Matrix M will work with everything? Probably not. But the data that we’ve generated shows that all the platforms that we’ve tried and the antigens that we’ve picked in our studies showed positive results.

So that is really encouraging. With a very reasonable tolerability profile, and that is another characteristic. So we’ve compared it, for instance, in the COVID realm with the available mRNA vaccines and asked exactly that question. How does the reactogenicity and tolerability compare? And it’s also part of my presentation at the World Vaccine Conference showing a much lesser reactogenicity, about thirty nine percent less adverse effects.

And when it comes to the tolerability, we’ve undertook a study looking at the quality of life of recipients, and that is also very encouraging.

John Jacobs, President and Chief Executive Officer, Novavax: That’s really important when you think about The U. S. Market, Alec, moving more toward consumer choice, right? It used to be roughly fifty fifty physician to pharmacy distribution of vaccines. And then post COVID, it went to almost ninety percent of pharmacy now.

Right? So that means a consumer has to decide he or she wants to be vaccinated, go on to the website, sign up, pick the vaccine they want. Consumer choice is driven toward less side effects. I don’t wanna be knocked out from work. I don’t wanna get a fever.

I don’t wanna have three days of just feeling under the weather. You know, I’d like to get the maybe the Novavax shot because I understand it may have better tolerability. So right? So, you know, I got the Novavax shot. You’d hope I would.

Right? And but and I get the flu shot every year, and I’ve had the mRNAs prior to joining Novavax before Novavax was available in The US. I personally experienced the difference myself on side effects there. So personally had a one. I know it’s better for me anyway, but Rux showed that through the shield data that statistically it does have a remarkable difference and where it really matters.

So if consumer choice is moving toward combinations, hey, give me I’d rather have one shot than two or three. Right? Who wants to wait online three times at CVS filling out clipboards and staring at the carpet tiles until you get caught. Right? You wanna do that once and get out of Dodge.

Right? And you’d rather have something that’s more tolerable than not if you can. Right? So this fits right into that with what we think we can do with our combinations. And then you take a look at the five most invested in, at least in The US from a portfolio perspective markets.

In the recent McKinsey report that was just published in April of this year in the vaccine marketplace, the five key markets are in order, you know, flu, COVID, and then you come you come down the list to RSV and RSV combinations, and then you come down to the of the world, the pneumococcal vaccines of the world, and you got shingles. Right? So if you have those different buckets, we’re in all all five, right, either directly or indirectly. So four of them, we’ve got our own late stage combination COVID flu, our own standalone flu. Right?

We’ve got our own shingles vaccine early on In the preclinical right now in preclinical that we’re looking at where we believe we could have potential of less tolerability, but in the efficacy

Roxandra Adragia Ackley, Head of R&D, Novavax: Or fact.

John Jacobs, President and Chief Executive Officer, Novavax: Well, I mean, yes, less side effects, better tolerability.

Alex Stranahan, Senior Biotech Analyst, Bank of America: Yay. That’s good. I know what you meant.

John Jacobs, President and Chief Executive Officer, Novavax: We wanna be worse, Alec. We’re going for it. So but but that’s good. And then we released data on pneumococcal vaccine that’s already marketed with our matrix m showing better immune response, right, and the potential to lower COGS in in an asset like that. Right?

So we’ve got data on that, and several companies, six or seven, have those products in their pipeline according to that research report. Right? So we’re aware it counts with our pipeline, with our technology across multiple platforms. More and more steps toward potential partnerships are happening with MTAs where people are experimenting with Matrix M and their labs across multiple companies. It’s getting exciting.

Let’s see if we can pull this all home and through. That’s our intent, and we’re excited about our strategy and our potential right now.

Alex Stranahan, Senior Biotech Analyst, Bank of America: Yeah. No. No. That’s that’s great. So definitely plenty going on in the pipeline, but those will, you know, advance through the clinic, hopefully data over the next twenty four months from those programs.

We’ve got the kick readout, which is kind of middle of this year. I think you you guys talked about that a bunch on your

John Jacobs, President and Chief Executive Officer, Novavax: Not a pivotal trial, just a cohort, but it’s to learn because we only had about 75 patients in each arm on the phase one, two rux, right? We wanted to generate more data that when and if we do find a partner for that and we design a registrational trial go forward, you have a much more robust data set, right, to understand the safety and to understand the right mix and ratios and things for a pivotal trial, right?

Roxandra Adragia Ackley, Head of R&D, Novavax: Yes. It will help enormously in the design of a phase three clinical trial. Right.

Alex Stranahan, Senior Biotech Analyst, Bank of America: And the intent is to potentially partner that one?

John Jacobs, President and Chief Executive Officer, Novavax: That’s the intent.

Alex Stranahan, Senior Biotech Analyst, Bank of America: Okay. Well, maybe in the last minute, I do wanna talk about, you know, the p and l. This has been a real focus, one of the pillars when you first joined.

John Jacobs, President and Chief Executive Officer, Novavax: Yeah.

Alex Stranahan, Senior Biotech Analyst, Bank of America: What inning are we in on on that front? And, you know, is there more work to do there, or do you feel like you’re in a pretty good place to sort of drive the the next leg of growth for?

John Jacobs, President and Chief Executive Officer, Novavax: Jim, you wanna address that on liabilities and cost reduction, etcetera?

Jim Kelly, Chief Financial Officer, Novavax: And I think it’s fair to say it’s both p and l and balance sheet. And the way I would describe it is, my goodness, you know, what what a last few years it has been to literally reconstruct this company from a pandemic era company swinging for the fences, develop the vaccine to help save the world to now let’s become classic biotech, and to do so by shedding our liabilities. We’re down 80%. Right? We’re on track to reduce our r and d and s g and a compared to 22 by another 80%, eighty five % towards being about 250,000,000 by 2027.

So we’re in the final stretches. This is important because as we can put the balance sheet and cost structure behind us, people can focus uniquely on value creation. That’s where we are. And as I listened to John and Rux talk about the future opportunities for our matrix and our vaccines and the market in general, when we take the long view and we look at a vaccine market that’s currently 50,000,000,000 a year, it’s got to grow to 75,000,000,000 or more, knowing the utility of our platform across many of these categories, we ask ourselves what percent of that market might we have, not might we get a product out. We’re asking, why not the majority of products leveraging our matrix to make and drive new vaccines, better vaccines?

And so that’s how we’re seeing the world. The early installment of that thinking, the Sanofi deal. You need only see that, and now you’re watching other other major vaccine players beginning to work with our technology. And that’s how you know we’re on the path. So thrilled to have, I’ll I’ll say, hitting those late innings on the getting our cost structure and financial story in in order, it’s really all about value creation now.

Alex Stranahan, Senior Biotech Analyst, Bank of America: All about it. Well put. Well, I think with that, we’re we are at time, so we’ll have to leave it there. But please join me in thanking the the whole Novavax team. Thank great discussion about it.

Jim Kelly, Chief Financial Officer, Novavax: Thank you. Thank you.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.