When you murder your most loyal customers, they stop coming back...
Sasha Latypova
Due Diligence and Art
Moderna cuts R&D budget by $1.1B, Charles River lays off 3% staff.
According to Endpoint News, Moderna is in financial trouble. They are not even “break-even”, i.e. not generating positive cash flow from operations! This is after Trump’s Operation Warp Speed showered $10B+ on them in a span of about 18 months. Where did all this money go? Swiss vaults? Secret underground bases in Antarctica where Bancel is planning to hide out for the duration of Armageddon? I don’t know, I am not well versed in these conspiracies.
💬 To kick off its annual R&D day in New York, Moderna said Thursday that it will slash its annual spending on research and development by $1.1 billion by 2027. The biotech will also stop developing five early-stage programs, place other drugs on the backburner and focus on a handful of late-stage mRNA medicines.
Simultaneously, Moderna overhauled its long-term financial projections, and it now forecasts the company’s break-even point in 2028 instead of 2026. The shake-up will not include major layoffs, Bancel told Endpoints News, and he envisions the company staying around its 6,000-employee headcount for the next three to five years.
But, you see, according to Bancel, this is because “it’s working!”, just like your beautiful mRNA shot is working as promised…
💬 “It’s a moment of evolution, in the sense the platform is working, which is the most important thing,” Bancel said. “We just want to be responsible and financially disciplined.”
Moderna’s stock price $MRNA has fallen over 80% over the past three years, erasing about $150 billion in market value from its all-time, pandemic highs. The Wall Street is not impressed:
“R&D reductions are too far out chronologically to be credible from a management team that we think has proven serially unable to project the performance of their business,” Leerink Partners analyst Mani Foroohar wrote in a Thursday morning note to investors. Foroohar holds an underperform rating on Moderna’s stock.
Jefferies analyst Michael Yee also said he expects the investor debate to continue over whether Moderna can reach profitability without raising additional money, noting that the R&D cuts are occurring “further out in time.” Break-even forecast delayed two years.
The cuts will slash Moderna’s R&D spending by about 20% from 2025 to 2028, from a total of $20 billion to $16 billion.
The focus will be 10 product launches by the end of 2027, including vaccines for Covid, flu, RSV, norovirus, and cytomegalovirus, or CMV. I have personally reviewed the CMV vaccine data in animals when I reviewed Moderna’s animal testing data for mRNA covid shots. That’s because they simply put in CMV studies from 2017 into the covid shot package in 2020 and said it’s all the same! To some extend that’s true - it’s all the same poison, from the same source - DARPA/DTRA/CDC. The data from 2017 showed that the CMV vax distributes all over the body, accumulates in major organs where it causes death and injury. It is just as poisonous as anything else Moderna makes. This company is mostly a storefront for the US government/DOD pushing injectable poison under false pretenses of “public health”. Moderna doesn’t “develop” any new medicines, as they had fired anyone competent in drug development long before 2020. Their manufacturing is “fully digital” so that people on the floor can’t ask any questions.
The RSV vaccine is a flop, as people are becoming less stupid. That’s good news.
💬 So far, Moderna has struggled to gain commercial traction with its RSV vaccine, called mResvia, in an intensely and newly competitive market with rival shots sold by GSK and Pfizer.
Other prioritized programs include two rare-disease therapies and a Merck-partnered cancer vaccine program.
Moderna is also stopping five early-stage programs (thank goodness):
mRNA-1287, an endemic human coronaviruses vaccine
mRNA-1345, its RSV vaccine in the infant population
mRNA-5671, a KRAS-targeting cancer vaccine
mRNA-2752, a cancer drug
mRNA-0184, a heart failure therapy
In addition, Charles River Laboratories is cutting around 3% of its total workforce in “response to current trends”. Charles River is the main provider of animal studies for the global pharma industry. Since they are the early stage R&D provider, this indicates overall shrinkage of the pharma industry pipelines.
The Wilmington, MA-based company is laying off staff as well as “streamlining” its cost structure to “optimize its footprint, be more effective in supporting clients, and drive greater operating efficiencies, ” the spokesperson added.
As of Dec. 31 2023, the company had around 21,800 employees globally, and a 3% cut could mean that around 650 staffers would be laid off.
The company noted that pharma clients are overall pulling back on their R&D spending, which has a negative impact on CDMOs and manufacturers. Many pharma companies are shrinking their pipelines to cut costs, a trend Charles River CEO James Foster predicts will continue into next year.
Couldn’t have happened to a better bunch of people…
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Image: © S. Latypova. AWIP: http://www.a-w-i-p.com/index.php/2024/09/17/when-you-murder-your-most
