Moderna reported revenues of $570.7 million in the third quarter of 2020, beating Wall Street expectations.
Joseph Prezioso / AFP via Getty Images
The biotech Moderna announced early Thursday that its chief medical officer, Dr. Tal Zaks, will leave the company in late September.
Zaks, who has worked at Moderna (ticker: MRNA) for six years, has been one of the leading figures of the firm as it built its messenger RNA technology and, over the past 13 months, developed and commercialized a Covid-19 vaccine.
He was a true believer, even as critics questioned the company’s large valuation in the pre-Covid era. “There’s no scientifically plausible way where this entire technology will only yield one drug or one vaccine,” Zaks told Barron’s back in the summer of 2019, sitting in his office in Cambridge, Mass., when the company was far from the household name it is today. “It just doesn’t make sense. If it works for an application like a vaccine, it should work for more than one. That was what got all of us who joined here really excited.”
The company is now worth more than 10 times what it was when Zaks made those comments. His sizable, prescheduled sales of Moderna stock drew significant press notice late in 2020. The company’s chief executive officer, Stéphane Bancel, thanked Zaks in a statement Thursday, saying: “Tal has made a contribution that extends beyond Moderna to all of society.”
Asked why Zaks was leaving, and what he planned to do next, the company said it had nothing to add beyond its statement.
News of Zaks’s impending departure came amid a wave of news from Moderna, including its announcement late Thursday that it had doses of a new version of its vaccine designed to protect against the South African variant ready for testing.
“I think of this as an insurance policy,” Zaks told Barron’s on Wednesday. “We’re prepared, should we need it.”
And on Thursday morning, Moderna reported revenues of $570.7 million in the third quarter of 2020, including product sales of $199.9 million, beating Wall Street expectations. Analysts had expected revenues of $279.4 million, according to FactSet. Moderna reported losses per share of $0.69 for the quarter, worse than the FactSet consensus estimate of $0.34 per share.
Moderna also said that it now plans to make at least 700 million doses of its Covid-19 vaccine this year, up from its previous low-end estimate of 600 million. And it said that it expects to be able to make up to 1.4 billion doses in 2022.
Investors reacted well to the rush of news, sending shares up 3.1% in pre-market trading. The stock is up 38.6% so far this year, and 453.5% over the past 12 months.
“I believe that 2021 will be an inflection year for Moderna,” Bancel said in the company’s quarterly earning statement. “We previously believed that mRNA would lead to approved medicines, and we were limited in our ambitions by the need for regular capital raises and keeping several years of cash to manage financing risk. We now know that mRNA vaccines can be highly efficacious and authorized for use, and we are a cash-flow generating commercial company.”
Bancel said the company had created commercial subsidiaries in eight countries in 2020, and would open three more in 2021.
“We plan to accelerate and significantly increase our investments in science and grow our development pipeline faster,” he said.
Moderna reported total revenue of $803 million for 2020, up from $60 million in 2019. Research and development costs were $1.37 billion in 2020. The company reported a net loss of $272 million in the fourth quarter of 2020, and $747 million for the year.
Write to Josh Nathan-Kazis at [email protected]
