Moderna Is the COVID Vaccine Front-Runner

the vaccine. Still, the company is worth twenty four billion dollars because of his current work. Peter loftus reporter for The Wall Street Journal, joins us for more on vaccine front runner Maderna. Thanks for joining us, Peter, thanks for having me on. We've got some good news surrounding vaccines for coronavirus lately. Researchers said that an experimental coronavirus vaccine from Fiser and their partner is showing promising signs of

working in an early stage study. But we want to focus on an article that you wrote about the front runner right now, the COVID vaccine front runner Maderna, and they are entering their third stage of trials later this month. They're the ones that are the furthest along in this process, and there's a lot of hope behind the vaccine that they're trying to develop. But some interesting things about this company, They actually have no track record when it comes to

creating these types of vaccines right now. They haven't done it just yet. And um, you know, you wrote about their CEO and the culture of the business that they run. Peter,

tell us a little bit more about it. This is a biotech company that was started about ten years ago and they're still in what you would call the development phase of the company in the sense that they do have multiple drugs and vaccines that they're working on, whether it's in the labs or even in clinical trials in patients to test them, but they've never actually received approval

to sell one of these drugs. So going into this year, they were working and I think more than twenty different drugs and vaccines for various diseases, including cancer and infectious diseases, but there were still a good two to four years away from being in a position to have their first product on the market. So then what changed, obviously was the pandemic and they eventually got involved in developing a coronavirus vaccine, as you mentioned, and if it's successful, that

holds the possibility of being their first product. And so it's an interesting situation because they are a relatively young company using an unproven drug development technology and they're sort of jockeying with these bigger, more established companies that do have more of a track record of vaccines and drugs

in this global chase for a coronavirus vaccine. Sounding a little bit more about this experimental development technique that they're using, because the way they're doing it, they're using m RNA messenger RNA to develop their vaccine. The other two front runners for vaccines right now are one from Oxford and Astra Zeneca and Johnson and Johnson. They're expected to start some of their later trials later this year, I think

August in September. But they're doing it kind of the classic way where you get like a little piece of the virus or a dead part of the virus, and then you know it kind of makes the immune system respond to that. So the moderna vaccine works in a slightly different way. How does theirs work? I just need to clarify that the way that the vaccines from Oxford and Astra Zeneca, as well as Johnson and Johnson, they're

actually not the old traditional way of making vaccines. They do use virus material, but what they actually do is take a common cold virus and they weaken it so that it's not really going to infect anybody, but it serves as sort of a carrier to get some of the DNA from the coronavirus into the human body, into human cells, and that sort of sets off a cascade

of events that is supposed to provide immunity. That's actually a relatively new technology and there haven't been a ton of vaccines based on that, so I just want to

make that clear. But it is different from what Maderna is up to, and what Maderna is up to is basically using a genetic code as the basis for its vaccine, and so in their case, they're using what they call messenger RNA or m RNA that is part of the genetic code from a protein that's found on the surface of the coronavirus, and what they do is they inject that into people and once that gets into the human body, it instructs human cells to basically make that protein or

make a close copy of that protein, and then that then triggers an immune response, so that sort of makes the immune system think that the coronavirus is present, and then the immune system builds up defenses that theoretically would then prepare a person for when they're actually exposed to the virus in the future, although that part still has

yet to be proven. So there's two different styles and madernas they use the RNA based approach, and this type of technology really has not been seen in any approved or licensed drug or vaccine to date, but they say that there is a potential advantage to doing it with this approach because they can design and manufacture these vaccines much more quickly than other ways. They're going to be entering their third stage of testing with I think like

thirty thousand people. And this is the real deal right here. This is where a lot of vaccines end up failing in the process. So there's a lot of hopes behind what this next stage of the trials is going to

go through. The news that people may have heard to date, including today, about the Fiser vaccine has been from early relatively small clinical trials with you know, relatively small number of people where they're basically just assessing safety and whether the vaccine triggers an immune response as measured by taking blood samples, and they need to do that just to sort of set of baseline expectation that this is not going to be harmful if they rolled out to a

broad number of people. So now, yes, these bigger trials that are going to start getting underway in the next couple of weeks are gonna more definitively show not only safety, not only immune response, but also whether the vaccine actually protects a person from either getting infected or from developing a severe form of COVID nineteen. So those are being awaited as sort of the most definitive proof to date about which ones are going to work and which ones

aren't going to work. All of the work right now being done on vaccines with regards to coronavirus has been moving at lightning speed compared to the past and how things have been done before. Let's say the trials, well, let's say we are getting good immune responses. Let's say

there's not many side effects and it's actually working. How quickly would we be able to get that out to the masses, because I think I read in the article that you know, the CEO is confident that if it works, maybe in the fall they could have some emergency uses of the vaccine for frontline healthcare workers and things like that. But to manufacture it and to get it out to

the public and mass, how long would that take. That aspect of the lightning speed is that a lot of companies, and with the help of governments and other organizations, they basically started to manufacture doses of their various vaccines before they've proven whether they work or not, And so that's different from normal vaccine development normally, it's it's more of

a serial step. So I think that it's a very optimistic and hopeful view that some of these companies have that there could be preliminary results and data from these big clinical trials within a few months that might show whether they work. So therefore, the US government, using its public health emergency powers, could say, we think we have enough data to allow one or more of the vaccines to be used, but maybe at first on a limited basis,

like let's give it to healthcare workers first. So that's possibility.

I think there are people who are skeptical of that and feel like it's going to take longer than that to really get a clear answer about whether these vaccines are safe and effective and yes, and then the manufacturing also is an issue in the sense that, well, there might be some initial doses that could start to be given to healthcare workers, it still probably will take much longer to really scale up production and have enough to just vaccinate the whole country or vaccinate a good percentage

of the globe. Well, I mean, it's going to be a huge summer for vaccine development as this trial is going to go through and others are going to start. Tell me a little bit about Maderna, the company, because now they're worth about twenty four billion dollars their CEO as a billionaire as well. The country and the world's hope, so are kind of pinned on them right now to be the first one to finish developing the vaccine so

that we can hopefully get back to normal again. So tell me a little bit about the company and the culture there. The CEO is Stefan Boncel, and he has been leading the company pretty much from the start, I think since and for many years it's sort of labored in obscurity in the sense that it was not a household name, since it didn't have any products on the market, it was really only familiar to people in biotech circles

or people who invested in biotech. And so it's mission has been to take this concept of using m r n A to develop treatments and vaccines for a number of diseases. And so it's sort of grown steadily at first through private investments and then eventually at the end of it had an I p O and raised a fair amount of money, so it's more in the public eye. But for the first year or so, really through the end of last year, the stock was kind of in

a limited range and not really doing anything outstanding. And yes, it's really it's been this year and mostly because of its work on the coronavirus vaccine that it's just generated a lot more interest and with that a big increase

in stock price and value. What we talked about in our article, what we reported was a company culture that was not only focused on really trying to develop this new way of making drugs and vaccine, but also a real hard charging culture, very high expectations, very demanding, requiring a lot of hours from workers, and what you could call sharper blunt critiques of workers if they weren't meeting

management's expectations. So this has motivated some employees to do better, but others don't see that as their cup of tea and have left. And so for a number of reasons, including that culture, I think it's been a subject of debate that the company has in the eyes of people who work in the industry as well as invest three. As I said, there's a lot of hopes behind this company and behind the potential vaccine that they're developing right now. So we'll have to see how it goes over the summer.

Peter LOFTUS reporter for The Wall Street Journal, thank you very much for joining us my pleasure. I'm Loscar Ramirez and this is reopening America. Don't forget effort today's big news stories. You can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast every Monday through Friday. So follow us on I Heart Radio or wherever you get your podcast.