Spurred by reports of biopharma executives exercising stock options in conjunction with announcements about COVID-19 vaccine developments and government contracts, U.S. lawmakers want to close the loopholes that make such actions legal.
While its mRNA COVID-19 vaccination effort gets the most attention these days, Moderna Inc. is also moving in other directions as the company will lead mRNA discovery programs drawn from its early stage pipeline in new collaborations with Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc. and Italy’s Chiesi Farmaceutici SpA. These two deals highlight the “huge opportunity for mRNA beyond SARS-CoV-2 and vaccines,” Piper Sandler analysts wrote Sept. 16.
The U.S. government bought 100 million doses of mRNA-1273 from Moderna Inc., of Cambridge, Mass., with a new award worth up to $1.525 billion, a deal that drops the implied cost per dose below that of several other companies receiving funding through the government program.
A safe, effective COVID-19 vaccine may be available by the end of the year or early next year, as will the supplies needed to deliver and administer hundreds of millions of doses. That’s the message five biopharma executives delivered to a House subcommittee July 21 as they updated U.S. lawmakers on the progress their companies are making on the vaccine front.
An editorial yesterday in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) marveled that “the world has now witnessed the compression of six years of work into six months,” and went on to ask the question that’s on everyone’s pandemic-wrenched mind: “Can the vaccine multiverse do it again, leading to a reality of a safe, efficacious COVID-19 vaccine for the most vulnerable in the next six [months]?”
Two more companies, Novavax Inc. and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc., are on the receiving end of U.S. federal government funding to develop and deliver a COVID-19 vaccine in 2021.
The question of prices for a COVID-19 vaccine have raged in recent days. Gary Disbrow, acting director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), told members of a Senate committee that vaccines developed with the help of taxpayer funding will come with an appropriate reduction in price. However, CDC Director Robert Redfield emphasized that the cold-chain distribution system for those products requires the same kind of at-risk investment that is used for vaccine development.
The share prices of blue-chip biopharmaceutical companies closed out the month on a high note to contribute to their stellar collective performance during the second quarter, with the BioWorld Biopharmaceutical index increasing almost 20%.
