When Stéphane Bancel took the reins of Moderna, he had a staff of one and a laptop. A decade later, he is the CEO of an $80 billion company that says it will make up to a billion doses of its Covid-19 vaccine this year. The stock has risen more than 1,300% since the start of 2019.
Born in Marseille, France, Bancel says he didn’t like biology in high school, but fell in love with the “elegance” of biochemistry in college. He received a master’s degree in biochemical engineering from the University of Minnesota and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School before going to Eli Lilly (ticker: LLY), and then serving as CEO of the diagnostics firm bioMerieux (BMXMF). He started as Moderna’s (MRNA) CEO in July 2011.
We spoke with Bancel, one of Barron’s Top CEOs for 2021, in early June. Here is an edited transcript of that conversation.
Barron’s: When you started at Moderna, where did you think the company would be in 10 years?
Bancel: It’s 10 years in a month.
It was most likely that we would not be commercial 10 years after. I had hoped that we would find a way to make the science work, to have enough drugs in the clinic that we might be, I would say, another three to five years out to commercial [after 10 years].
It moved a little bit faster than that. What has life been like inside of the company over the past year or so?
My wife will tell you: The more pressure he has on his shoulders, the more focused he is.
When we started chasing the virus, I thought it was going to be an outbreak, like MERS or SARS. But the big pivot for me and the company was the week of January 20 at Davos. I’m like oh, it’s going to be a pandemic like 1918.
What was easy for us is, we didn’t have to try to motivate any employees or spend a lot of time explaining what was going on.
The thing that has been most amazing for me, being on the inside, is the level of collaboration, ingenuity. It seems that all of us, the clinical team, manufacturing team, I mean, everybody was really pulling together in a way I’ve never seen. Also collaborators – just the FDA has been amazing. Sometimes two, three meetings in a day. That same process would take two months in a normal drug.
There’s so much attention and so much desire to understand where we were, that we felt a moral obligation to be very transparent, because we were all in this pandemic together as a planet. But that outside scrutiny made us waste a lot of time.
How has your thinking evolved on booster shots? Do you still think that the booster market is as large as we imagined it was two months ago?
Yes. Even larger.
More than ever, we believe that coronavirus vaccines won’t provide lifelong immunity.
The big unknown is the variants, of course. The more [the virus] migrates away from what has been coded into the original vaccines, the lower [the vaccine’s] efficacy is going to be. And you have waning immunity over time.
My mom has leukemia. She was vaccinated in January, as per order of priority in Paris. But do I want her to go spend next fall and winter without the boost, given she’s immunocompromised and 72, and she might get a variant? Yeah, I would like her to be vaccinated [again].
This is the conversation I’ve had with a few health ministers in the past few months.
Immunity is going to wane because of time, and because of variants. So the question is, are we going to be two months too late, or two months too early at boosting? I propose we should rather be two months too early, than two months too late
As long as you have the safety data, two months too early isn’t going to hurt anybody. But two months too late you’re going to have people in hospital and dying, and the economies in lockdown again.
The booster vaccine market seems to be getting a little more crowded with the positive Novavax (NVAX) data. Are you concerned that Moderna could get squeezed between Pfizer (PFE) and Novavax?
A lot of countries last year, when they were purchasing [vaccines] for ’21, got burned because they bought vaccines from companies they thought could have high efficacy and deliver manufacturing. A lot of them learned their lesson the hard way. Europe, as you might know, has said they don’t want to buy any more [AstraZeneca] vaccines in ’22.
2022 sales are happening right now. [On Moderna’s first-quarter earnings call I said] we are talking to all recurrent countries that signed up for ’21, for ’22, because we have to do the kids and boosting, of course. And there’s a lot of countries that never signed for Moderna vaccine in ’21 that want mRNA vaccines.
If you are health minister in, pick a country you like, you have to make a decision soon, because if you don’t decide soon for Moderna, I’m telling you, you won’t get product in the first quarter [of 2022]. The first quarter is almost full.
People aren’t appreciating is that 2022 sales are happening right now. Even at 10 bucks, if you need 20 million doses, that’s $20 million. That is not pocket change for medium [sized] countries or governments. And so, do you buy a vaccine that you know is going to work, from a company that’s been reliably delivering to you doses?
That’s the piece about Moderna that a lot of people don’t appreciate. Look at the issues [ AstraZeneca ] has had in Europe or [ Johnson & Johnson ] has had in the U.S. We have delivered, manufacturing-wise.
Can I ask you one more thing? Where do you think the virus came from?
The hypothesis of a leak from Wuhan, I think it’s possible. Because humans make mistakes. The theory that it was leaked on purpose, I believe is a very low probability.
Could it be a human mistake done in a Wuhan lab where somebody then went home and infected, without knowing, their family…and then it looked like flulike symptom and they’re just sick at home? That’s highly possible. I am incapable of handicapping it from a probability standpoint, versus coming from an animal at the Wuhan market. It’s impossible to put a probability on that scenario.
Thanks, Stéphane.
Write to Josh Nathan-Kazis at josh.nathan-kazis@barrons.com
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