Moderna Bernstein Insights: Healthcare Leaders and Disruptors – 3rd Annual Healthcare Forum

Right. Good morning. It is a great question. Actually, Moderna has never been a COVID-19 vaccine company.

Exactly. I know most people think of a company like this.

Moderna has been, since day one, an mRNA platform company.

As you know. We have always built the company in terms of how do we maximize the value of a company by developing the most exciting medicine for patients, doing things that cannot be done with other technologies, across many, many therapeutic areas. That was our vision since the beginning. I would say people who know us well, I think in the IPO S1, anybody who is interested in doing research, go read the IPO S1.

The intro, I think 10 pages or whatever, it describes what we set as a company strategy since the beginning. We reinforce it during the IPO process. COVID happened. Of course, we never planned for COVID. We thought it was a company responsibility because we had done nine vaccines in the clinic before to try to get a COVID-19 vaccine in case this was going to become a pandemic, to help as many people as we could. We are very thankful for what the team has achieved with all of our partners to help protect so many people during the pandemic. That was off plan. It was off strategy. It was not the strategy. It was a huge distraction. But it was the right thing to do for the world.

What we've been doing since there was no vaccine available end of 2021 in the world is to kind of go back on strategy.

But because it takes a long time in this industry to get moving, we're now starting to get to a place where I think people are well doing the work, because it's a platform company, so it's complicated. It's not a one-product company. But people that are doing the work, I think, are starting to realize more and more in the last 12 months since our Analyst Day in November of last year, where people are starting to say, "Okay, this is not a COVID-19 company. It's really a platform company." What actually is also interesting is that we're actually the only mRNA platform company left. Because if you think about it, CureVac was the first mRNA company. Their vaccine failed in phase III during the pandemic in the spring of 2021.

I think because they made a big scientific mistake of an insight we had because of all the research we did and all the investment we did in science. We took a very different scientific route, which I think paid off nicely. They are gone. BioNTech just announced a splitting of the company, keeping related stage assets in the company and starting a new company. Translate Bio was bought by Sanofi, who recently announced stopping the mRNA vaccine programs. So we are, de facto, because of what happened, the only mRNA company standing up, and the breadth of a company is very exciting.

Because basically today we have a vaccine business with five approved products.