5 Late-Stage mRNA Vaccines to Watch
5 Late-Stage mRNA Vaccines to Watch
The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic heralded an unprecedented period for the pharmaceutical industry, with vaccines progressing from R&D to worldwide rollout in record time and garnering record-breaking profits for developers. The FDA approval of the mRNA vaccines themselves was also a landmark event, acting as a proof of concept and ushering in this new class of treatments.
“COVID-19 accelerated the timelines of the mRNA pipeline, opening the aperture for the companies to start expanding more broadly into other infectious diseases and then to continue to advance the non-infectious disease part of their mRNA pipelines,” said Jennifer Heller, a partner at McKinsey & Company, which recently published a report on innovation in vaccine development.
This is what happened for Moderna, which recently followed its COVID-19 vaccine with the FDA approval of a respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine.
The global mRNA therapeutics market size is expected to reach $68 billion by 2030, according to Statista. Within the overall vaccine pipeline, Heller told BioSpace that mRNA technology is disproportionately represented when compared to other technologies, particularly in Phase I trials.
One advantage for mRNA developers is that they can rapidly develop a potential product, as happened during the pandemic. This means that the growth in mRNA vaccines at the early stage of the pipeline could soon be seen later on. It could also establish the technology’s advantage over traditional vaccines, which typically take between five and 10 years to develop and bring to the market.
“The advantage of being able to rapidly create a product that can be tested in the clinic lends itself to accelerated development and that’s been the promise of this technology platform,” Heller said. “I think we’re still in early days and so we’ve only had a few products to look at, but I think the trend suggests favorable timelines.”
