As Mod­er­na piv­ots away from Covid-19 to oth­er vac­cines, the mR­NA-fo­cused biotech is still plot­ting how it could hit $13 bil­lion in an­nu­al US Covid-19 vac­cine sales, with $100 shots and 50% of all adults get­ting a boost­er.

But the Boston-based com­pa­ny’s lofty ex­pec­ta­tions, re­vealed in a slide show yes­ter­day as part of its R&D day, in­clud­ed an es­ti­mate that the world­wide pan­dem­ic Covid-19 vac­cines mar­ket is worth more than $100 bil­lion glob­al­ly, as in high-in­come coun­tries, the el­i­gi­ble high-risk pop­u­la­tion (el­der­ly and those with high risk) is about 340 mil­lion peo­ple.

“Our cur­rent pric­ing ap­proach with gov­ern­ments was in a pan­dem­ic set­ting; as we head to the com­mer­cial mar­ket, we’ll be look­ing at a more val­ue-based pric­ing,” Mod­er­na chief com­mer­cial of­fi­cer Arpa Garay told in­vestors yes­ter­day.

And in the US, Amer­i­cans will have to fend with the com­mer­cial mar­ket as the gov­ern­ment won’t have the nec­es­sary funds to make Covid vac­cines free for all af­ter the end of this year.

But in­sur­ance will still like­ly cov­er much of the cost of the shots for many af­ter switch­ing over to a com­mer­cial mar­ket, and the US will still dole out about 170 mil­lion of the up­com­ing bi­va­lent boost­ers for free this fall and win­ter, HHS’ As­sis­tant Sec­re­tary for Pre­pared­ness and Re­sponse Dawn O’Con­nell wrote in a blog post late last month.

Arpa Garay

Garay told in­vestors yes­ter­day, “The Covid mar­ket is go­ing to start re­flect­ing more like the flu mar­ket,” not­ing there’s a high like­li­hood that the Covid boost­ers will be an­nu­al, and most of the dose con­tracts will get done ear­ly in the year, and dos­es will be shipped lat­er, very sim­i­lar to the flu dy­nam­ic.

But plans for $100 Covid-19 vac­cines would be a new high, and al­most six times more than what the US gov­ern­ment ini­tial­ly paid for the first dos­es.

Ini­tial­ly, ac­cord­ing to the New York Times, Mod­er­na charged the US gov­ern­ment $15 to $16.50 for each Covid-19 shot (al­though the gov­ern­ment al­so chipped in $1.3 bil­lion for its de­vel­op­ment), and the EU paid be­tween $22.60 and $25.50 for its Mod­er­na dos­es.

But Mod­er­na not­ed that it isn’t the on­ly one see­ing such a big price leap, as ac­cord­ing to CMS pro­jec­tions for 2023, the cen­ters es­ti­mate an av­er­age per dose Covid-19 vac­cine cost of $64, and vac­cine ad­min­is­tra­tion cost of $40.

New York City is investing $20 million in biotech this year in the form of a 50,000-square-foot “innovation space” at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, complete with offices, research laboratories and events and programming space to grow biotech startups and companies.

Mayor Eric Adams said during his State of The City Address last Thursday that there will be an “emphasis” on making more opportunities for women and people of color to further diversify the industry. The City first reported the news.

Boehringer Ingelheim uncorked some positive results suggesting that Spevigo can help prevent flare-ups in patients with a severe form of psoriasis, months after the drug was approved to treat existing flares.

Spevigo, an IL-36R antibody also known as spesolimab, met its primary and a key secondary endpoint in the Phase IIb EFFISAYIL 2 trial in patients with generalized pustular psoriasis (GPP), Boehringer announced on Monday. While the company is keeping the hard numbers under wraps until later this year, it said in a news release that it anticipates sharing the results with regulators.

AstraZeneca, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi won an appeals court win on Monday, as the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit found that the companies cannot be forced to provide 340B-discounted drugs purchased by hospitals from an unlimited number of community and specialty pharmacies.

“Legal duties do not spring from silence,” the decision says as the court makes clear that the federal government’s interpretation of the “supposed requirement” that the 340B program compels drugmakers to supply their discounted drugs to an unlimited number of contract pharmacies is not correct, noting:

A US appeals court has ruled against Johnson & Johnson’s use of bankruptcy to deal with mounting talc lawsuits, deciding that doing so would “create a legal blind spot.”

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a previous bankruptcy court decision on Monday, calling for the dismissal of a Chapter 11 filing by J&J’s subsidiary LTL Management.

Faced with more than 38,000 lawsuits alleging its talc-based products caused cancer, J&J spun its talc liabilities into a separate company called LTL Management back in October 2021 and filed for bankruptcy, a controversial move colloquially referred to as a “Texas two-step” bankruptcy. Claimants argued that the strategy is a misuse of the US bankruptcy code — and on Monday, a panel of judges agreed.