Squawk Pod Reports from Davos: Moderna’s Stephane Bancel 01/21/23

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We currently have in the clinic a COVID booster and flu booster in one dose. A COVID booster, flu booster, and RSV. People don't even remember now, did I get a COVID shot this winter or a flu shot?

Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, back in person in January for the first time since his team started working on the COVID vaccine, deploying mRNA technology.

The technology is quite special.

How far we've come in the fight against COVID-19 and the next virus Moderna's taking on.

We started the Phase 1 for the RSV vaccine in January 2021, just after the COVID-19 vaccine was approved. And here we are just 24 months after, we are announcing Phase 3 positive data.

The golden age of vaccines has begun, and it's happening in and out of the lab.

I think governments and industry have to work together with, of course, the scientific and academic community to figure out how do we educate people? How do we share the real-world evidence?

I'm CNBC producer Cameron Costa. Squawk Pod reports from Davos. Moderna's Stephane Bancel begins right now. It's our final episode covering the 2023 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. And this week, a lot of news has been made. One such piece of news Promising results from Pfizer and Moderna's RSV vaccine trials. So promising, in fact, that both companies expect expedited approval for their respective vaccines from the FDA. The last time we were at Davos in January, we were also talking about drugmakers and public health, but it was 3 years ago, the very beginning of 2020.

The CDC has identified a case of coronavirus in Washington State, the Wuhan strain of this. If you remember SARS, that affected GDP, travel-related effects.

Do you—

have you been briefed by the CDC? Are there words about a pandemic at this point?

No, not at all.

And we're— we have it totally under control.

It's one person coming in from China and we have it under control. It's going to be just fine.

That was our Joe Kernan and then-President Donald Trump in Davos just before the whole world shut down in crisis. Since then, at least 6.7 million people have died from COVID-19, but over 12.7 billion vaccine shots have been administered, in large part thanks to drugmakers like Pfizer and Moderna, who, lucky for all of us, were already thinking ahead when cases of coronavirus started to spread. Let's rewind to Davos 2020. Here's Joe, Becky, and Andrew back in the before.

The death toll from the coronavirus in China has risen to 9. Chinese health officials confirmed that 440 cases of the flu-like virus exist. Another 2,200 people who came in contact with infected people have been isolated at this point. Here in the United States, the CDC has confirmed the first case in a Washington State resident who recently returned from a trip to China. Earlier today, I spoke with Stephane Bancel. He's the CEO of Moderna Therapeutics. This is a company that we listed as a CNBC disruptor.

I know Stephane.

He told me that they are working with the NIH right now to try and develop a vaccine for this very issue. He said there's a couple of things that they're looking at very closely. The difference, of course, from this week versus last week is that there is a confirmed case of a human-to-human transmission. They have to look at human-to-human transmission, how it happens. Is it bodily fluids or is it airborne transmission? And then number 2, the mortality rate. And that's how they're trying to figure out how quickly this one is changing, how rapidly those things are happening. What's very interesting about Moderna Therapeutics, though, is that they have developed a cancer vaccine that they can get into development and into the patients in 40 days in that production cycle, which is kind of amazing. That was for a cancer vaccine. They're hoping to use that very same technology to go ahead and put this in a situation with development— use that same technology to now do it for a contagious disease. And that's the challenge. But very interesting to see these companies that are out there working and trying to find practical ways.

They tried to do flu vaccines and it's 30% effective. The rhinovirus, which causes the common cold, is a coronavirus. We don't have a vaccine against the common cold.

The problem with the flu is there's so many different mutations. And the quick—

the question is the same with the rhinovirus, right?

Does this— does that— how quickly does it mutate? And that will tell you how human-to-human transfer is.

How rare is that? And it doesn't look nearly as deadly as SARS, which at this point—

his point was that you just don't know how quickly this mutates itself. And that's what they're tracking so very carefully.

3 years and many, many, many masks, jabs, tests, and variants later, we're back in Davos, where Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel is talking to our team again, on the record this time.

Nice to see you again.

I'm good. Thank you, Sarah.

Here he is on location in the Alps with CNBC Squawk Box anchors Joe Kernan, Becky Quick, and Andrew Ross Sorkin. And they start With that RSV news.

Stephane, welcome.

Thank you for having me.

Great to see you.

You know, I want to talk about this RSV vaccine and the promise that it brings for what's happening, but I'd like to go back because the last time we were here in Davos in the winter, it was January 2020.

Yeah.

And I saw you at that point, and we were at a breakfast right over here at the Belvedere.

I remember.

And you came up to me in this small room and you were talking about how you had actually the You were working on a vaccine for COVID. And at that point, COVID-19 didn't even really exist in our minds.

We were just hearing about the virus.

I think there was no name at that time.

Coronavirus.

Right. It's amazing how much you've accomplished in such a short amount of time.

Oh, thank you. We've had a lot of people helping us, a big team, a lot of partners. And the technology— we'll talk about ours in a minute— the technology is quite special.

Yeah, it is unbelievable. I mean, the idea that it's the first time we're seeing you back here and how much has been happening since then. What about the RSV? Why did you go after RSV? What does this show you? How is the platform working?

Sure. So pre-COVID in 2019, if you look at the respiratory viruses that drove hospitalization in the US and around the world, RSV was number 2. It's not very well known. It used to be not tested. And because there's no vaccine, nobody really talked about it. There's a flu vaccine, of course, as you know. And so as we just look at the impact on the world, hospitalization and deaths, we say we need to find a solution. And so we deployed the mRNA technology. And actually, if you look at one of the amazing things about this technology is we started the phase 1 for the RSV vaccine in January 2021, just after the COVID-19 vaccine was approved. And here we are just 24 months after we are announcing phase 3 positive data. So think about how long it would have taken for traditional technology. I mean, Joe, maybe 6, 7, 8 years.

What do you use? It's not a spike. Is it a spike protein?

No. In that case, it's a surface protein.

Yeah.

pre-fusion protein, which is one of the key proteins of the RSV virus.

Highly conserved.

Correct. Highly conserved. It doesn't mutate as much as flu or COVID. And so we ran the experiments in the clinic on 37,000 participants, placebo control, you know, double-blind randomized, all the good stuff. And very happy when we were able to share the results in the New York Times. And we are preparing the filing to the FDA if need be. We actually, during the Christmas break, bought a voucher to accelerate the filing and the access to market. And the other great news about mRNA is because all the products use the same manufacturing process, we don't have capacity constraint because we can use exactly the same equipment, people, and raw material as with the COVID shot.

Lipid, same lipid to get to the site where it's expressed. Similar side effect profile, I would imagine.

Actually, it's very interesting. The grade 3 kind of fever and things like that, the placebo group. So people who got water in placebo, 2.8% in the active group, the vaccine group, 4.0%. So I see it's very, very close to the placebo group. So we really like the high efficacy and very good tolerability.

Can I ask you something really quickly? And it's still in dispute. Do you think a, for example, with COVID the messenger RNA vaccine, I always assumed natural immunity was better because it would have been generated against the entire virus. There were others that argued and I argued on the air that why would a spike protein that's such a specific part. It's a great way to do it. But I would still think natural immunity would be better. And they disputed that at first. They said, no, we concentrate the spikes together and it gets the— but wouldn't the whole virus give you better immunity than a portion of it?

Actually, it has been debated a lot.

Yes.

And actually, the real-world evidence data actually show that people vaccinated have less risk of being hospitalized than people not vaccinated. It's really hard to run a That's a very precise study.

It's a different method than infection itself, I guess.

Can I just ask you, though, a related question? It's a trust question. It actually has to do with Davos and the sort of this idea of all these plutocrats here and the idea that there were mandates for vaccines and just the trust of, frankly, the leaders, both policy leaders and business leaders, who took these positions over the last year or two. And now that they're— now, if there weren't questions then, there are clearly questions now. And how do you think about that? In the grand scheme of things, especially when you actually are introducing potentially new vaccines and whether people will trust and be willing to take them?

Yeah, it's a great question, Andrew. And if we look around the world, because we have a chance to talk and to provide vaccines to many, many countries, it's really amazing to see the differences. Like you have a country like Portugal with extremely high vaccine rates because there's been no political debate about the vaccine. There's actually not been public scientific debate. The scientists debated in closed doors, and then with all the data, they recommended to the population to take the vaccine more as a esprit de corps as a country to protect the elderly, to get the economy back together.

But there's a question whether transparency in that case then is a good thing or a bad thing. I think in places like the United States and part of parts of Europe, they would say actually there wasn't enough transparency. In fact, as this sort of Twitter files have now emerged, and you've probably watched some of these things. There's all sorts of disputes about who is trying to influence what— government officials, corporations, etc.

Yeah.

I mean, if you look at the data, I mean, the clinical data were run, you know, by independent data safety monitoring board. The FDA or the EMA in Europe look at all the data, you know, case by case like they do. We run the entire analysis themselves. I think the science was very strong. I know the timelines were very surprising to everybody.

Right.

Because it was kind of world record. But I can guarantee you the process that was used, a phase 1, a phase 2, a phase 3.

What would you have done differently if there was something you would have? And what do you think has to happen now to the extent that there are going to be scientific breakthroughs and there are going to be people, unfortunately, who aren't going to trust the science?

Yes. So it's a tough question that I think governments and industry have to work with together. We are, of course, a scientific and academic community to figure out how do we educate people? How do we share the real-world evidence data? I mean, just on the Moderna vaccine, 800 million people have gotten the vaccine.

Unfortunately, people do invoke science that don't know anything about science. And science— there's one thing is for sure, that these vaccines saved our collective assets. There's just no doubt about it. But did it prevent transmission? Did people say it did? Yes. Did people say you need to protect everyone else and we need to send the military in to vaccinate everyone? They invoked science. That was not science. The science is you get myocarditis much worse from coronavirus than you do from, from the vaccine. So take your— pick your poison.

Although, how many, how many vaccines? I mean, with the RSV vaccine, I hate RSV. I think of it with little kids because it runs through those kids' populations really quickly. How many vaccines is going to be too many, though? How many should you—

So that's a great question, which is why we're trying to combine them. So we currently have in the clinic a COVID booster and flu booster in one dose, a COVID booster, flu booster, and RSV also in one dose. Because I agree with you, when we talk to consumers, people don't even remember now. Did I get a COVID shot this winter or a flu shot? Think about when you had the third one for people that are, you know, 50, 60 and above.

Is there medical literature on whether too many immune, you know, stimulating your immune system too many times, can that become a problem? Do we know? Is there data?

So I think it's always the same question, which is a great scientific question, which is how do you run a controlled experiment? Right. Figure out. No. And there are so many— what we do, you know, people who do sport, not sport, the age, comorbidity and so on. It's so hard to be very precise about the science. So we just need to be careful and keep watching and monitoring like we do with the side effects and events to make sure we protect the population.

I get sick from the COVID booster. I mean, every time that I've gotten it, it's got—

that makes sense because your body is—

your immune system just reacts to it.

Yeah.

And that's a good sign. You know, some of my friends, we don't— I have no reaction.

Is there any way 5 years from now there could be an adverse long-term effect on your immune system.

I don't know.

I don't know. I think it's highly unlikely talking to scientists. But again, with science, never always are there results.

Science is changing. That's why it's an art, not, you know, this.

Stephane, thank you so much.

Thank you so much.

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That's a wrap for this series of Squawk Pod Reports. Thank you for listening to all of our special episodes from Davos this week. And if you missed any, just go back and have a listen. They're short, sweet, and easily found right in your podcast feed. Our regular 3-hour weekday TV broadcast, Squawk Box, is hosted by Joe Kernan, Becky Quick, and Andrew Ross Sorkin on CNBC. Squawk Pod is produced by me, Cameron Costa, Katie Kramer, and Caroline Rehodes. John Lazaration is our editor.

Have a great Does it feel like your student loans are a permanent part of your life? It doesn't have to be that way. With SoFi, you can consolidate your student loans and refinance with a shorter term, potentially becoming debt-free sooner. Join over 580,000 members who have already refinanced their student loans with SoFi to take control of their financial future. Getting started is easier than you think. View your rate at sofi.com/next today. SoFi student loans are originated by SoFi. SoFi is a member of the NCUA. By SoFi Bank N.A., member FDIC. Additional terms and conditions apply. NMLS 696891.