Stéphane Bancel, Moderna CEO (Endpoints JPM)

Mod­er­na puts a sea­son­al flu vac­cine in the clin­ic as ex­ecs hope to open chap­ter 2 of their block­buster vac­cine sto­ry

Mod­er­na ini­ti­at­ed a Phase I/II study to­day aimed at see­ing just how well it can do in field­ing a fu­ture vac­cine that could tar­get a range of res­pi­ra­to­ry ail­ments with just one jab.

Re­searchers dosed the first pa­tient with mR­NA1010, their quadri­va­lent vac­cine for sea­son­al flu, tar­get­ing a line­up of lin­eages that in­clude in­fluen­za A H1N1, H3N2 and in­fluen­za B Ya­m­a­ga­ta and Vic­to­ria.

“We ex­pect that our sea­son­al in­fluen­za vac­cine can­di­dates will be an im­por­tant com­po­nent of our fu­ture com­bi­na­tion res­pi­ra­to­ry vac­cines,” said Stéphane Ban­cel, the CEO of Mod­er­na. “Res­pi­ra­to­ry com­bi­na­tion vac­cines are an im­por­tant pil­lar of our over­all mR­NA vac­cine strat­e­gy. We be­lieve that the ad­van­tages of mR­NA vac­cines in­clude the abil­i­ty to com­bine dif­fer­ent anti­gens to pro­tect against mul­ti­ple virus­es and the abil­i­ty to rapid­ly re­spond to the evo­lu­tion of res­pi­ra­to­ry virus­es, such as in­fluen­za, SARS-CoV-2 and RSV. Our vi­sion is to de­vel­op an mR­NA com­bi­na­tion vac­cine so that peo­ple can get one shot each fall for high ef­fi­ca­cy pro­tec­tion against the most prob­lem­at­ic res­pi­ra­to­ry virus­es.”

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