Novavax at Goldman Sachs Healthcare Conference: Strategic Shift to R&D Focus

On Wednesday, June 11, 2025, Novavax Inc. (NASDAQ:NVAX) presented at the Goldman Sachs 46th Annual Global Healthcare Conference, outlining a strategic pivot towards research and development and diversified partnerships. CEO John Jacobs highlighted both opportunities and challenges as the company transitions from a commercial model to one focused on its recombinant protein-based nanoparticle technology and Matrix M adjuvant platform.

Key Takeaways

• Novavax aims to achieve non-GAAP profitability by 2027 through cost reductions and strategic partnerships.
• The company plans to cut its workforce by 80% by 2027, significantly lowering expenses.
• A $175 million milestone was achieved following BLA authorization, signaling financial progress.
• Sanofi’s minority equity investment and licensing agreements mark a key strategic partnership.
• An Investor Day is planned for late 2025 to provide updates on pipeline advancements.

Financial Results

• Liabilities Reduction: Novavax has removed over $2 billion in liabilities since John Jacobs became CEO in 2023.
• Expense Reduction: More than $1 billion in annual SG&A and R&D expenses have been eliminated.
• Headcount Reduction: The company is planning an 80% reduction in headcount by 2027.
• 2025 Revenue Framework: Revenue growth is expected from milestones and royalties.
• R&D and SG&A Spend: Core spending is targeted to be $250 million or below in 2025.
• BLA Approval Milestone: Received a $175 million payment in May following BLA authorization.
• Profitability Target: Non-GAAP P&L profitability is aimed for as early as 2027.
• Sanofi Equity Investment: Sanofi has made a minority (less than 5%) equity investment in Novavax.

Operational Updates

• Sanofi Partnership: Includes co-commercialization of Novavax’s COVID-19 vaccine and a license for Sanofi to use the Matrix M adjuvant in new vaccine products.
• R&D Pipeline: Launched four new early-stage programs in Q1 2025, including vaccines for RSV combination, H5N1 avian influenza, varicella zoster virus, and C. difficile.
• Matrix M Adjuvant: Multiple Material Transfer Agreements signed, including collaborations with two top 10 pharmaceutical companies and a partnered cancer vaccine.
• R21 Malaria Vaccine: Developed with Oxford University and Serum Institute of India, projected to save 180,000 children’s lives by 2030.
• Standalone Flu Vaccine: Phase three trial results showed robust immune responses, with plans to partner for further development.

Future Outlook

• Optimizing Sanofi Partnership: Expecting commercialization of the COVID vaccine in the US and Europe by Fall 2025.
• Potential Partnerships: Aiming to secure additional partnerships leveraging the technology platform beyond the Sanofi deal.
• Investor Day: Scheduled for the second half of 2025 to provide further updates on early-stage pipeline advancements.

For a complete understanding of Novavax’s strategic direction, readers are encouraged to review the full transcript of the conference call.

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

Operator: Are we ready to go? Are we live? Oh, hello, everyone.

John Jacobs, CEO, Novavax: Hi, I’m John Jacobs, CEO of Novavax, and I’m joined here today by Jim Kelly, our CFO, and Doctor. Roxandra Draghia, who heads up our R and D. I want to thank everyone who’s here today to join us and listening in to our presentation at the Goldman Sachs forty sixth Annual Global Healthcare Conference. Today’s 06/11/2025. I’ll advance the slide to our cautionary note regarding forward looking statements.

If I took the time to read all of this, we would use our full time allotment. So I’d ask that you please review this statement and all of our risk factors in our SEC filings, as well as on our corporate website before making any decisions about investment in our company. And I’ll move on to an opening slide, and we have this slide here for those of you who are more new to the Novavax story in the last few years. We’ve evolved our business model from one that was a vertically integrated commercial company to a model that focuses more on R and D and diversified partnerships. On the top right of the slide you can see from 2020 to 2022, the company was a vertically integrated commercial organization with a singular focus on its product launch, a COVID-nineteen vaccine called Nuvaxivid.

And the vast majority of company resources, expense, personnel effort and energy were spent bringing that vaccine forward and introducing it to the world. In early twenty twenty three, I had the good fortune to have the opportunity to join Novavax as a new CEO in January of twenty twenty three with mission to change the focus of the organization for long term growth and change the strategy. And the reason I came to Novavax was how excited I was about our proven technology platform, which we’ll touch base on a little bit later in the presentation. I truly believe at that time and even more so today after two and a half years with the company in the potential value of this technology and what it can do not only for the value of our corporation but for global human health. During 2023, in my year, we launched our product, which is a malaria vaccine that was developed in a collaboration with Oxford University and the Serum Institute of India.

And then of course our signature deal with Sanofi announced in May of twenty twenty four, which is a collaboration and license agreement that has multiple potential revenue streams, which I’ll touch base on in a few moments. And very importantly, post that deal announcement, we formed our new corporate growth strategy. We unveiled that late in ’24 and 2025 is the year that we’re now a full year into this strategy and very excited about what it bodes for our future. Moving on to the next slide. So what is that strategy?

Very simply, this strategy is designed to deliver value through two areas. R and D, in house R and D, early stage right now, building out a pipeline of high value assets. And secondly, partnerships to drive value creation. From our R and D asset platform, we have two late stage assets, which Roxandra will talk about later, as well as our early stage platform that Doctor. Draghi has put into motion as of Q1, and our well known Matrix M adjuvant.

So in line with that strategy and that two pronged approach to long term value growth, we have three strategic priorities for 2025. The is to optimize our Sanofi partnership. The is to leverage our technology platform and pipeline to forge additional partnerships beyond the Sanofi deal. And to advance our technology platform and our early stage pipeline. And what do we mean by advance the platform?

It’s our intention to expand the utility of Matrix M and Doctor. Draghi will talk a little bit later about some of the things she’s been working on, including potentially new formulations of Matrix M to broaden the utility of this important asset. Very importantly, supporting this new growth strategy and our priorities is a lean and focused R and D and business development operating model. Now in fact, over the last two and a half years since I’ve joined, we have removed over $2,000,000,000 of liabilities from our balance sheet. We have eliminated over $1,000,000,000 in annual SG and A and R and D expenses for the organization.

And it’s our plan that by 2027, we will have reduced the headcount in this company by approximately 80% since I’ve joined. Now we’ve done that without sacrificing our capabilities to support our partners and or to drive this strategy. So it’s very important. A couple of other points on this when it comes to partnerships. We announced in Q1 that we had an MTA signed with a top 10 pharmaceutical company by market cap definition to explore our Matrix M with assets in their pipeline.

We also announced that an organization that had signed prior with us an MTA to explore bacterial antigens expanded that to now explore viral antigens as well. That occurred in Q1. And finally, we signed an agreement with an organization that has an oncology asset to experiment that Matrix M in the lab. So those are three additional moves toward future partnerships along the lines of this strategy on the BD side. And on the early stage R and D pipeline, Ruxandra announced four new early stage programs in our pipeline that we launched in Q1.

So just so far the of this year, you see four new programs on the R and D side. You’ve got multiple irons going into the fire for potential partnerships above and beyond Sanofi. Our focus is obviously on optimizing that relationship with our outstanding partner Sanofi, leveraging our tech, advancing our tech platform as we continue to reduce our costs and have a strong financial base for the future. I mentioned earlier that what excited me most about Novavax when I joined the company back in 2023 was the tech platform that really fuels innovation. It’s the foundation for why we can do a strategy like this and believe we can grow value and have a strong impact on global public health.

It’s comprised of two key components: our recombinant protein based nanoparticle technology platform, which is highly immunogenic and efficacious and as you can see on the left side, clinically proven and has multiple positive factors when it comes to development of combination vaccines, tolerability, refrigerator, stable, etcetera. And our Matrix M adjuvant, this is our proprietary adjuvant. It can be added to vaccines to help induce a stronger, more potent and longer lasting immune response. May also help reduce the cost of production by using less antigen in a product, potentially enable new vaccines to be developed for certain poorly immunogenetic pathogens. So let’s spend a few moments on strategic priority one, our partnership with Sanofi and then I’ll hand the mic over to Ruxandra to talk about strategic priorities two and three and Jim Kelly, our CFO will close the presentation out from there.

So taking a moment on Sanofi partnership. As we said earlier, the Sanofi partnership has the potential to drive growth through multiple revenue streams. So moving to the left side, upper left of the slide, it includes a license to co commercialize Novavax’s current standalone COVID-nineteen vaccine worldwide. The component, license to Novavax’s adjuvanted COVID-nineteen vaccine for use in combination with Sanofi’s flu and other vaccines, both of those verticals, the license to commercialize our vaccine as a standalone and the license to combine our COVID vaccine with their flu and or other vaccines are associated with hundreds of millions of dollars in potential milestones and royalties for years to come. The lever in the contract is a non exclusive license to use our Matrix M adjuvant in new vaccine products should Sanofi choose to develop new products with our adjuvant, each one of those eligible for hundreds of millions of dollars in milestones and mid single digit royalties for up to two decades post launch.

And finally, Sanofi took a minority less than 5% equity investment in Novavax when we consummated the deal last year. But we don’t intend to stop there. In fact, we believe that future partnerships will further validate our tech platform and have the potential to provide significant opportunity to drive value creation, increase access to our technology and benefit global health. And we continue to pursue additional partnerships today and look forward to sharing any of those as they may materialize in the future. Moving on to Slide eight, I won’t go through the table here with you today, but it’s there for your reference.

It outlines that Sanofi partnership has potential to provide durable cash flows over time, cash flows that were immediate upon the consummation of the deal last year, near term, midterm and potentially long term. And you can see that here on the chart. column over shows milestones and what they’re associated with. Then the next couple of rows show the royalties associated with different aspects of the deal we just walked through as well as the cost reimbursement platform that comes with the deal. Moving on to slide nine.

Since a lot of the near term value from that arrangement comes from our vaccine that the company produced, our COVID vaccine, just want to highlight the unmet medical need here. COVID continues to cause severe illness. It doesn’t seem to be going away. In fact, more recent data indicates that up to four times higher, four times more people are admitted into the hospital with COVID than with flu. Yet, the graphic on the right of the slide indicates that COVID vaccine coverage rates are less than half of those of flu.

So what does this mean? One might draw the conclusion, well, the bar is smaller on the right than the left, therefore COVID is a smaller market than flu. Another conclusion is the market is moving toward combination vaccines. The majority of consumers indicate a preference for combination vaccines. Several companies, including Moderna, Sanofi, and we, plus others in other arenas beyond COVID and flu, are making or designing COVID vaccines executing clinical trials in that arena.

As combination vaccines come to market, it is our belief based on data and our partners’ belief that they’ve shared based on data that that should have the opportunity to grow the market. So what we see here is an opportunity to address a medical need where four times the number of people around the world are getting hospitalized due to COVID than flu, to get that vaccine in one convenient shot along with their annual flu vaccine. And that makes us excited about the future of this market potential. Slide 10 talks about, so how do we begin to differentiate ourselves from mRNA and other vaccine platforms? Well, let’s start with Nivaxavir tolerability.

A real world evidence here that was presented by Ruxandra recently at the World Vaccine Congress shows a consistent clear differentiator versus mRNA is the tolerability of our product. In fact, approximately 39% fewer symptoms were seen in participants in this study. You look at local pain tenderness, arrhythmia swelling, systemic fever, fatigue, muscle pain, malaise, time and time again, Novavax delivers a nice option for consumers that has consistently better and clearly differentiated tolerability, which matters to consumers. It also matters in combination vaccines and what we’ve shown is that our Matrix M, quite possibly uniquely, enables the development of combination vaccines where you can load in less antigen, multiple antigens but less volume of each, get the immune response you’re looking for without paying the price on tolerability necessarily. So that’s a big advantage that we see to our Matrix M adjuvant.

And we see it beginning to play out here just with our platform that includes Matrix on our COVID vaccine. Thank you for your time on strategic priority number one. I’d like to hand it over to Alexandra Draghia, our head of R and D to cover strategic priorities two and three. Alexandra?

Roxandra Draghia, Head of R and D, Novavax: Thank you very much, John. So moving to priority two, and that relates to the value generation through partnerships. Our partnership with the University of Oxford and with Serum Institute resulted in the R21 malaria vaccine, which is recommended in children as young as five months of age, and it is one of two vaccines recommended to prevent malaria in malaria endemic areas. It is very consequential, and this data comes from GAVI, so from the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, that malaria vaccine will save one hundred and eighty thousand children’s lives by 02/1930. And we are proud to be part of offering one of these solutions.

As part of our Sanofi partnership, we welcome the news that Sanofi is developing two combination products using Nivaxavir with both Flubox and Fluzone high dose, and these are currently in phase onetwo studies. It is also very encouraging to see that both vaccine candidates were granted fast track designation by the FDA. And lastly, as John mentioned, Sanofi license the rights to develop combination vaccines using our aside from using the COVID-nineteen vaccine, actually to develop other vaccines using Matrix adjuvant. And we are looking forward to hearing what those new programs would be. Aside from that, in addition to our current partnership, there is significant and growing interest in Matrix M.

We have signed multiple MTAs, as John has mentioned in his presentation, including with two top 10 pharmas to explore Matrix M in their own laboratories and a preclinical collaboration to explore Matrix M in a partnered cancer vaccine. Other MTAs in collaboration with academic investigators are exploring novel approaches with multiple vaccine candidates. Furthermore, another partnership includes a vaccine design in the context of preparedness against H5N1 avian influenza, and we are looking forward to developing these potential partnerships in the future. The versatility of Matrix M was demonstrated through its successful application as an adjuvant co administered with a broad array of vaccine types and targeted diseases, including, as you can see in this current slide, recombinant protein vaccines, nanoparticles, virus like particles, and other preclinical studies have been undertaken with purified recombinant protein vaccines and even an adenoviral vector vaccine. In all these studies, we have seen an enhanced immune response, a broadening of the immune response, while keeping that favorable reactogenicity profile that John has mentioned.

But we are not stopping here, and current and future opportunities in our own laboratories or together with collaborators will focus on combination vaccine, assessing combinations of mRNA vaccines, and in oncology, and other applications. Indeed, we are also working on the matrix formulation itself, in particular in the context of the oncology, and hoping to advance that particular field and generate exciting data. We have talked about combination vaccines. And John highlighted the desire both of medical professionals and of the general public to actually receive these combination vaccines. And it is very interesting to see that this market research suggests eighty three percent of those who receive both influenza and COVID vaccines, and sixty nine percent of those who receive one would adopt a combo bearing no material impact to reactogenicity and efficacy.

So because of this type of finding, we have actually designed a study that would address exactly that. Our kick and standalone flu vaccine candidates and to an initial cohort of a phase three trial, which we’ve announced and we start enrolling in December 2024. The objective of this descriptive trial was to assess the safety, reactogenicity, and immunogenicity of our KIT and standalone flu vaccine candidates compared to Fluzone High Dose and Nuvaxavir, respectively. This particular study enrolled approximately 2,000 adults over the age of 65, with participants randomized to one of the four arms showed in the slide. The doses of each of the components are highlighted in the slide.

I’m not going to actually read all of that. As mentioned, this cohort was designed to provide descriptive data on three flu strains, so H1N1, H3N2B, and the SARS CoV-two component with a goal to inform a future registrational phase three program. As we’ve communicated before, we intend to partner both vaccine candidates to further advance development. And now moving to the data and to the study results. Results from this observational initial cohort showed that both kick and standalone flu vaccine candidates induced robust immune responses and were well tolerated.

Nearly all, so more than ninety eight percent of solicited adverse events were mild or moderate in severity. Both vaccine candidates showed immune responses to the vaccine strains with GMFRs ranging from 2.4 to 5.7. Moving to the next strategic priority, so strategic priority three, we are here talking about advances to our technology platform and early stage pipeline. As we have announced previously, aside from the priorities that we have described in priority number two, we have announced four preclinical programs which are currently developing in our own labs. Those are an RSV combination, the H5N1 avian pandemic influenza vaccine, varicella zoster virus vaccine, and the C.

Difficile vaccine. The details of each and every one of these vaccines and why we are pursuing it are captured into this particular slide, but I would like to say that we are actually using a lot of information derived from AI, machine learning, on the design of the antigens, on the study design, on the models. So our decision making, both in the selection of the programs and how we are moving these programs forward, is actually informed both from internal and external sources. So moving to the actual programs, the H5N1 avian flu program is actually addressing an unmet medical need, as they are all the others, but each and every one a different unmet need. So here we are talking about a vaccine that could potentially produce protective levels of immunity after a single dose in primed animals.

And this particular study will be soon published in a top tier journal. We are standing ready to join pandemic preparedness efforts, and we are currently pursuing funding and partnership opportunities for this program. Furthermore, we are talking about combination vaccines. This is why we are moving towards an RSV combination, which is not only building on our historical expertise, but really taking the data available in the literature and asking the question, can we build a better vaccine that could address a multitude of needs? Our technology has the potential to improve the current standard of care and enable a more tolerable, less reactogenic shingles vaccine.

And this is the reason behind the program. And finally, C. Diff. Why C. Diff?

There is a significant unmet medical need with no approved vaccine, and our technology has the potential to facilitate the development of a multivalent adjuvant vaccine that could have a right enhanced activity. So with that, I’m turning to Jim. All right.

Jim Kelly, CFO, Novavax: Thank you very much, Alexandra. And so in addition to advancing our priorities to improve human health through our validated technology platform, our plan is to do so with a lean operating model as a means to drive shareholder value. And here’s exactly what we mean. Our intent is to drive to profitability. And by this, we mean non GAAP profit.

Pull out non cash items like stock based comp, but drive to non GAAP P and L profitability as early as 2027. How do you get there? Well, we introduced our 2025 revenue framework where you can see through a combination of milestones as described earlier and the beginnings of royalties that we see can be exceptionally valuable over time through the Sanofi agreement and additional partnering agreements over time, we have the ability to drive significant top line growth. In parallel, we’re driving down our cost structure. As we had described our R and D and SG and A for 2025, what we have shared with everyone is our intent is to drive our core spend of R and D and SG and A to $250,000,000 or below.

And when you do so and you adjust for our current kick investment and Sanofi support, you discover that we’re well on our way towards that goal. The combination of all these things, driving top line revenue through partnering and royalties, plus driving down our cost structure are key ingredients to driving long term value. And as we continue to monetize our innovative technology through additional partnering deals, we believe there is great value to be created as we move forward. So with that said, what do and what should everyone expect as we move forward? Keep a close eye on additional Sanofi related milestones.

Exceptionally happy to report last month the BLA authorization and the receipt of the $175,000,000 related milestone. Watch for additional partnerships. There’s significant interest in our technology as described today. And also, watch for the advancement of our early stage pipeline. We are planning for a Investor Day in the second half of this year where we can further report back on the important advancements we’re making with that pipeline.

In terms of milestones, mentioned a moment ago, the BLA approval in May. Today, exceptionally important, we announced our kick in standalone flu data. Importance, because we believe we have got ourselves a data set that’s partner ready and when we have every intent to partner those programs. As we move forward, Sanofi begins to commercialize our COVID vaccine this fall in both The US and Europe. And as Sanofi has noted, this year is a learning year for them, which makes perfect sense.

We just got our BLA approved. And as we have heard, 2026 is going to be the year where they have the full cycle to prepare and drive our COVID vaccine in the marketplace. In addition, in 2025, we will be transitioning The US and European markets. Both those markets upon transition, 50,000,000 milestone will be available to the company. And then finally, something we’re all watching closely are those two phase one, two kick programs that Sanofi has ongoing.

And upon completion of them, the potential to initiate a phase three, one or more themselves. With all that said, this is just the beginning. We couldn’t be more excited of the progress to date and the opportunity that lies ahead of us. And with that, I’d like to thank you.

John Jacobs, CEO, Novavax: Thank you, Jim. Thank you, Roxandra, and thank you everyone for joining us today.

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