Vaxcyte, Inc. Common Stock Wells Fargo 21st Annual Healthcare Conference

Yeah. Okay. Whenever you're ready.

Yeah, our pleasure. Thank you for inviting us.

Yeah. Thank you all for coming. Delighted to be here. If you don't know Vaxcyte, we are a vaccine platform company. We have a cell-free protein synthesis platform that allows us to do two key things that are out of reach of other technologies. First, and what we're probably best known for, is the ability to perform site-specific conjugation, which allows us to create an opportunity to do one better than a really important class in the vaccine field, which are the conjugate vaccine class. In addition to that site-specific conjugation technology, we also have an opportunity to make difficult-to-make proteins that can be toxic to living host cells.

The way that we make proteins are in cells that have been extracted from the host, and so they can produce antigens of interest that you can't produce in a living host where most of the protein antigens for vaccines are produced. We have been leveraging that technology since, well, over 10 years, since we got the company started, and that has turned into a really robust pipeline led by our pneumococcal conjugate vaccine franchise, where we're leveraging that site-specific conjugation technology to sidestep the governor on the expansion of coverage for this class. We're developing, originally, a 24-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine. We've now graduated, at least in the adult indication, to a 31-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine. The technology has allowed us to bring in another vaccine into the clinic, which is a group B strep vaccine.

We're all vaccines all the time. We're based in California, and we're very excited about some upcoming clinical readouts that we'll have over the next year that we'll get into.

Yeah, look, I think from both a regulatory perspective, from a policy perspective, I think the direction of travel is constructive relative to really most any time last year. We think vaccines continue to be well understood and recognized as an important public health tool. From a regulatory perspective, I think the direction of travel, as an example, Moderna and its flu vaccine from situation last year, where a refusal to accept a filing to recent approval, I think that's an indication of the, again, more positive regulatory backdrop. From a policy perspective, we continue to be engaged as a company at all levels of government, the executive branch, members of Congress, the federal agencies.

There continues to be noise in the vaccines field, but in substance, we haven't seen material change, and importantly for us, given our lead programs, as Grant said, in the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine space, nothing but affirmation of the importance of pneumococcal conjugate vaccines, both in the adult and the infant populations.

Yeah, I would just add, it's one thing for anxiety around vaccines for diseases that have long been extinguished. We have issues with this, obviously, in this moment with the resurgence of measles cases. But for a pathogen like pneumococci, this is a clear and present danger. People are being afflicted with community-acquired pneumonia, meningitis, invasive pneumococcal disease on a regular basis. These are omnipresent pathogens, and this is one of the reasons why the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine class has not been subject to the ongoing debate about certain vaccines in this moment. So on a relative basis, we've felt insulated in light of the particular target that we've been mostly focused on to date.

I would maybe just add at the end, I think that confidence and opportunity in vaccines is reflected in some of what you see just in the broader strategic landscape. Over the last couple of years, you've seen AstraZeneca, Sanofi, and more recently, Eli Lilly, continue to make investments in acquiring vaccines business, which I think is a testament to the opportunity and the confidence, notwithstanding the change that at least historically has been afoot from a regulatory and policy perspective, the confidence in the continued opportunity in this field.