Healthcare

See the 39-slide presentation that Moderna used to win over investors on its way to becoming the hottest company in biotech

We got ahold of the presentation that biotech upstart Moderna used to pitch investors in 2017.
At the time, Moderna had already raised more than $1 billion. The startup went on to raise $500 million in early 2018, before going public in December 2018.
This year, the upstart Massachusetts biotech became the first company in the world to test a coronavirus vaccine in people.
The vaccine work has propelled Moderna to command a market value of $55 billion, one of the richest valuations in the biotech industry.
Moderna’s COVID-19 shot was authorized by US regulators on Friday.
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Moderna has had a monumental year, transforming its business by developing a safe and highly effective coronavirus vaccine with record speed.

The Massachusetts biotech company started 2020 unknown to most people outside of the industry. Spurred by its vaccine work, Moderna has become a household name and its stock-market valuation has surged from $6 billion to about $55 billion.

The US Food and Drug Administration OK’d Moderna’s vaccine on Friday for emergency use. US officials plan to ship 5.9 million doses to more than 3,000 sites across the country in the following days. Overall, Moderna expects to produce 20 million doses in 2020 and somewhere between 500 million and 1 billion doses in 2021.

While most people hadn’t heard of the company until this year, Moderna didn’t come from nowhere. Ever since its founding in 2010, Moderna has pursued the lofty idea of developing a brand-new class of medicines based on messenger RNA.

mRNA is the genetic code that tells cells what proteins to produce. Until this pandemic, no mRNA vaccine had been proven to work in a large-scale study or authorized for widespread use. BioNTech and Pfizer are also using mRNA technology in their coronavirus vaccine.

The platform’s massive potential has wooed investors for years. Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel has said the company will either produce nothing or create dozens of drugs with the technology. That vision has led Moderna to raise massive amounts of capital as a private startup, including $450 million in 2015, $474 million in 2016, and $500 million in 2018.

Moderna’s December 2018 initial public offering raised $563 million at a $7.5 billion valuation, the largest-ever IPO raise in the biotech industry at the time.

Business Insider got its hands on a May 2017 pitch deck created by Moderna. It shows how Moderna pitched itself to investors years before it became one of the hottest companies in biotech. Moderna didn’t provide a comment for this story.

Let’s dive into Moderna’s 39-slide presentation from 2017.

Calling mRNA “the software of life” has stuck around for Moderna. The company has also long had an expansive pipeline of new drug. In 2017, it focused on infectious disease, cancer, and cardiovascular conditions.

This slide pits the drug industry’s massive $1 trillion revenue against its biggest problems. Most drug candidates fail in clinical testing and require a lot of time and money before they reach defeat.

Here’s the key question to Moderna’s entire existence: can we make mRNA-based drugs? This slide shows how this genetic material sits as the key connecting piece between DNA and proteins.

The vision for mRNA therapeutics is huge. This is why investors pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into the company, even as it seemed many years away from having substantial revenue. This slide suggests mRNA could produce proteins that existing drug technology can’t produce.

“If mRNA works once, it should work many times.”

If mRNA succeeds as a platform, Moderna says it can go after undruggable targets with less risk and more speed.

Moderna also made it a priority to develop the manufacturing process. In 2018, the company opened a 200,000-square-foot research and production facility.

By investing in mRNA as a platform, Moderna is aiming to apply that technology to a wide range of uses: vaccines, therapeutics and personalized cancer vaccines.

Prophylactic vaccines (like the COVID-19 shot) were seen as having the least technology risk by Moderna in 2017. The company is interested in exploring different applications for mRNA in cancer, the liver, and the lung.

As a young biotech, Moderna inked a range of partnerships with larger, proven drugmakers like Merck, AstraZeneca, Alexion, and Vertex.

Moderna clearly saw vaccines as the low-hanging fruit for mRNA — low biological and technological risks combined with a decently large market opportunity.

Moderna has been developing vaccine candidates since 2014, starting with influenza strains. The company is still testing its Zika, CMV, and Chikungunya shots.

Most biotechs focus narrowly on their pipeline. For platform companies like Moderna, the underlying technology and expertise is just as important.

The 2017 Moderna team had more than 300 scientists and engineers working on the mRNA idea.

Even year’s ago, Moderna was highlighting the speed of its “research engine.” With the coronavirus vaccine, the company was the first in the world to start human testing in March.

Moderna still leaned on contractors for manufacturing and services, despite its extensive investment in its own facilities.

The pipeline of experimental drugs and vaccines was growing rapidly in these years, as mRNA went from a concept into a testable idea.

Most of the pipeline was in viral vaccines.

Moderna has two vaccine candidates targeting different flu strains.

In 2017, Moderna was providing the first glimpses of human data from mRNA vaccines. These results show immune responses in 23 volunteers with one of its influenza shots.

Moderna was working on a Zika vaccine with US government researchers.

Data from mice suggested that the Zika vaccine could protect the little animals from the virus.

With the Zika vaccine, Moderna also touted its speed in development, a critical quality in responding to viral outbreaks. It took about a year to go from designing the shot to testing it in humans.

Cytomegalovirus is a common virus. While most people probably don’t know they’ve ever been infected, CMV can be serious for people with weakened immune systems and for infants.

Despite an urgent need for a CMV vaccine, there still isn’t any approved shot. Moderna plans to launch a late-stage study in 2021 for its candidate.

Moderna’s CMV vaccine candidate includes six mRNAs.

Moderna also collaborated with Merck, one of the largest drugmakers involved in both vaccines and oncology, to develop personalized cancer vaccines.

Moderna is aiming to customize each treatment to a patient’s specific cancer mutations.

Moderna also had an immuno-oncology project with AstraZeneca, another major drugmaker.

Like a lot of cancer biotechs, Moderna’s drug could be tested in combination with other treatments. This mice data suggested “synergistic efficacy,” according to the slide.

Moderna and AstraZeneca’s collaboration also included cardiovascular research.

Moderna presents more preclinical data to suggest it’s on the right track. This time from pigs.

The final slides get to some of the good stuff: Moderna’s cash.

Moderna was able to rapidly grow its cash position even while investing in its business. By the end of 2016, the company had more than $1.3 billion in cash on hand.

Even without raising more funds in 2017, Moderna still planned to have more than $1 billion in cash at the end of the year.

If mRNA is a 20-year cycle, 2020 will be right in the middle of it. The last bullet point — execution — has certainly been realized this year.

That concludes Moderna’s May 2017 slide deck.

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