Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for being with us here today. My name is Courtney Breen. I am the pharma analyst here at Bernstein, and I have the privilege of sharing this stage today with Stéphane Bancel, CEO of Moderna, as well as David Berman, recently joined Chief Development Officer at Moderna as well. I'm looking forward to a fun conversation. There's lots going on with the company at the moment. Stock price is moving a huge amount at the moment as well.
So there's lots of news ahead, and we're certainly excited for ASCO. Perhaps just to start really big and broad for those who haven't been following the company as closely, although I don't imagine that's many. Some may know Moderna as kind of a COVID or vaccines company. In a couple of minutes, what is Moderna today? What are the most material things that have changed in the last 12 months?
Right. Good morning. It is a great question. Actually, Moderna has never been a COVID-19 vaccine company.
Exactly.
I know most people think of a company like this. Moderna has been, since day one, an mRNA platform company.
As you know. We have always built the company in terms of how do we maximize the value of a company by developing the most exciting medicine for patients, doing things that cannot be done with other technologies, across many, many therapeutic areas. That was our vision since the beginning. I would say people who know us well, I think in the IPO S-1, anybody who is interested in doing research, go read the IPO S-1.
The intro, I think 10 pages or whatever, it describes what we set as a company strategy since the beginning. We reinforce it during the IPO process. COVID happened. Of course, we never planned for COVID. We thought it was a company responsibility because we had done nine vaccines in the clinic before to try to get a COVID-19 vaccine in case this was going to become a pandemic, to help as many people as we could. We are very thankful for what the team has achieved with all of our partners to help protect so many people during the pandemic. That was off plan. It was off strategy. It was not the strategy. It was a huge distraction. But it was the right thing to do for the world.
What we've been doing since there was no vaccine available end of 2021 in the world is to kind of go back on strategy.
But because it takes a long time in this industry to get moving, we're now starting to get to a place where I think people are well doing the work, because it's a platform company, so it's complicated. It's not a one-product company. But people that are doing the work, I think, are starting to realize more and more in the last 12 months since our Analyst Day in November of last year, where people are starting to say, "Okay, this is not a COVID-19 company. It's really a platform company." What actually is also interesting is that we're actually the only mRNA platform company left. Because if you think about it, CureVac was the first mRNA company. Their vaccine failed in phase III during the pandemic in the spring of 2021.
I think because they made a big scientific mistake of an insight we had because of all the research we did and all the investment we did in science. We took a very different scientific route, which I think paid off nicely. They are gone. BioNTech just announced a splitting of the company, keeping related stage assets in the company and starting a new company. Translate Bio was bought by Sanofi, who recently announced stopping the mRNA vaccine programs. So we are, de facto, because of what happened, the only mRNA company standing up, and the breadth of a company is very exciting.
Because basically today we have a vaccine business with five approved products.
And launches happening as we speak, launching two products this year. Think about the growth over the next few years. We have an oncology business, and we talk, I'm sure, a lot about intismeran, but that is only our first oncology product.
As Dr. David will tell you, there is many more coming that are as exciting as intismeran. And we own all of this.
Because intismeran, of course, is a 50/50 with a great partner, Merck. We have a rare disease business that we should know by the end of the year, pivotal data. But those kids have been on study and disease for years, and we have already shared the data many times. The drug is working. And because it is a genetic disease, there is no genetic biology risk. And because it is time-bound phase III, we know we are going to have data this year.
If you look at what we presented at Science Day in June, in liquid tumor multiple myeloma, shared antigen cancer vaccine, autoimmune diseases, at least three programs, including CAR T in autoimmune disease. The company's actually becoming a very broad mRNA platform. At its core, from a therapeutic standpoint today, a very, very important, I think, if you look at the next 20 years, immunology company.
In rare disease, oncology, autoimmune disease. I think what the team has really done an amazing job in the science and the labs is to figure out how can you exquisitely use mRNA technology and lipid delivery technology to interact with the immune system of humans. That, I think, if you think about the number of disease in an aging world, this is very, very powerful. I think people who are doing the work over the last years are starting to realize that COVID was just our first product, not the company.
Absolutely. I think this platform basis is an incredibly important part of the story, and I'm sure we'll continue to discuss it, as well as spending a decent amount of time on intismeran, which is incredibly exciting. David, you joined the company in March. There's been a bit going on. There was some late-stage disappointments with CMV. Norovirus is being pushed out. Some really exciting data with intismeran, and some challenges with the FDA in terms of some of the filing strategies as well. Can you tell us a little bit about your background, first of all, and why this was the right opportunity for you to come into, and the critical things on your to-do list at Moderna?
Courtney, thank you. Thank you for that. I began my industry experience about 20 years ago at Bristol Myers Squibb, right when it was starting to work on ipilimumab, and I helped to develop ipilimumab. That launched, of course, the checkpoint revolution. After about 10 years at BMS, I moved to AstraZeneca, where I led the immuno-oncology franchise and helped to launch IMFINZI there. Then three years after that, I joined a small biotech called Immunocore to launch the world's first TCR therapeutic called KIMMTRAK. I've always been attracted to innovative immunotherapy programs. If you look at the arc of my career, and in fact, it mirrors the arc of the excitement of immunotherapy, it has really been an arc.
It's almost been a bell-shaped curve, unfortunately, because there was a lot of enthusiasm for the PD-1 field, a lot of investment, and then it sort of seemed to plateau when the field came to believe PD-1s were the ceiling, that there was nothing really you could maneuver on the immune system to really improve above PD-1s, and so enthusiasm has tailed off. The phase II data that was presented by Moderna and Merck a few years ago, to me, radically rearranged that belief.
When I saw that data, I tore apart that phase II trial backwards and forwards to try to find the flaws in it. Actually, when I joined, and Stéphane remembers, I said, "This will be a landmark phase II trial because it's the most rigorous, beautiful phase II immunotherapy cancer trial that I've seen." Most times people go straight to phase III. That's why I joined, because I believed at the time that if intismeran is positive, it will herald a new wave of enthusiasm, and it's been borne out in my opinion. We can talk more about intismeran and my enthusiasm for it. In terms of what I'm doing here or what I'm doing in the first couple of months, it's really threefold. The first is to build a therapeutics development group.
There's a superb infectious disease development group, obviously, from COVID and beyond, five products. We need to equal that on the development side. So developing expertise in development therapeutics, number one. Number two is intismeran. It was to help bring it over the finish line and help it get launched, and then what else do we need to do with intismeran? Number three was what we are calling mRED, Moderna Research and Early Development, which is to rapidly move forward those early-stage therapeutics programs that should be moved forward and rapidly stop those that shouldn't, to make rapid decisions. I think that's where maybe my effect might initially be seen is making rigorous decisions on phase I and II trials.
Fantastic. Really, really helpful. Maybe just to spend a couple of moments on intismeran purely from the perspective of we're going to get some new data presented soon. You already have it in hand.
It seems likely, but making it a real drug.
We've got a big conference coming up. Without giving numbers ahead of that medical meeting, how should we be thinking about what clinically meaningful means? How should we be thinking about this phase III relative to the phase II and that path to getting this drug approved, especially given there was a potential with the phase II and it wasn't able to be delivered against?
Right. I'll take the first stab, and Stéphane, please add anything. If you remember the initial approvals of pembrolizumab and nivolumab in adjuvant melanoma were against placebo. First, initially in stage III, and then eventually also moving earlier to stage II. Those are both fantastic drugs. They beat placebo, and they are widely used and standard of care. This trial adds on to Keytruda versus Keytruda, so it's not a very easy control arm to beat. The fact that it hit its primary endpoint at the first interim analysis, I think, tells you one thing. Secondly, it also hit distant metastasis-free survival at the first endpoint. That was the secondary endpoint. It's the first adjuvant trial to hit both primary and secondary endpoints at the interim. It's the first phase III adjuvant trial to beat a PD-1 monotherapy as an add-on.
I think the fact that it combined both stage II and stage III into a single population, because stage II is even harder to beat than stage III, and the fact that it still had a statistically significant endpoint tells you about the strength of this data. I think the phase II was a phase II trial, and phase II adjuvant trials, of course, are not controlled well enough usually for FDA approval. This is an 1,100-patient trial, a rigorously controlled, blinded phase III trial. I am very confident that we have a strong case for approval.
Fantastic. Maybe just one of the big questions and debates around intismeran at the moment is where else might it work? You have obviously got a development plan that spans different tumor types, predominantly, to your point, adding on to IO where it exists today. However, it is not just early-stage indications. You have got some metastatic indications. You have also got some indications that are perhaps not traditionally as immunogenic as others. How should we think about that repeatability of this melanoma data in less hot tumors, but also in patients where their immune systems might not necessarily be as intact? I know you have got some phase I pancreatic data anticipated later this year as well. How informative will that be for helping to unlock and answer those questions?
Yeah. There is a couple of ways that I think about it. One is if you look at the phase II trial and you look at the subset analysis by tumor mutational burden, high TMB and low TMB, it is very interesting to see that the efficacy was the same whether the patients had high or low TMB. So what you can do then is you can take that famous TMB figure plot, which plots every tumor by the distribution of tumor mutational burden, and you can put a line or a bar where low TMB cutaneous melanoma is, and you can roughly assume that bar is going to cover tumors where intratumoral is going to work. Because at the end of the day, we need 34 neoantigens in a cassette. We do not need 1,000 neoantigens.
We need 34 good neoantigens, and we know usually only one-third of those are going to be immunogenic. So if you create that bar, essentially RCC, which is one of the next readouts that we are going to have, covers that lower TMB and cutaneous melanoma. In essence, I believe that everywhere checkpoints work, intratumoral should be able to work. It acts upstream of PD-1s. It is actually the first step. It is alerting the immune system. So our initial approach has been in adjuvant melanoma, which is the right place, and then looking in adjuvant lung cancer. By the way, we have stopped screening on our leading phase III adjuvant trial in patients who had no prior neoadjuvant therapy. We should expect to have randomization complete later this year. So that was posted on ClinicalTrials.gov. We have three phase III trials in lung cancer.
What we want to do is look in earlier stage disease also. This is something both Stéphane and I believe. Intratumoral does not need, I believe, a PD-1 to be active. Okay? You can combine it for strategic reasons.
Can you say that again slowly?
Yes. Intratumoral does not need a PD-1 to be active. I will pause there for a second because this is a really important point. There was a belief in immunotherapy that everything had to be added onto a PD-1, and I do not believe that is the case. If you take that to be the belief, which I do, intratumoral should be able to work in very early stages of disease where PD-1s are not used. So we have a stage I lung cancer trial ongoing, a phase III. We have a non-muscle invasive bladder cancer, essentially stage I intratumoral trial with BCG that is ongoing, randomized phase II. So there is our belief that intratumoral can go into very, very early stages, and the risk-benefit profile is very favorable also. After lung cancer, of course, we have RCC.
We have kidney cancer and bladder cancer, which should read out hopefully over the next 12 months or so. We are studying metastatic disease. Now that is a higher risk because in this case you are getting a sample of the tumor from one lesion. The patient may have multiple lesions. There is a higher risk there, but it deserves to be studied. Then finally, we are moving into tumors where either the TMB is very low, pancreatic cancer, exploring, or we are looking at tumors where PD-1s have not been as successful, although some are, and that is gastric cancer. We are studying the entire spectrum of opportunities for intratumoral.
And maybe just to add a couple of things and to step back. If you think about intratumoral, we are basically coding in one mRNA molecule, as David said, 34 mutations specific to the patient's cancer. And we know for a fact now, we should ask at ASCO in the spring, the translational medicine data was presented by the MGH group and our team, showing that we know for sure now, we believed it for the last 10 years, now we know for a fact that when you inject mRNA with all lipid in somebody's arm, I cannot talk about any other mRNA approach I do not know with mRNA algorithm, because we need to talk about data as well. That is very important for selection. We know for a fact now we can create de novo T-cell in the patients, and we can expand T-cells.
Based on that mechanism, as David is saying, I think our strategy is pretty simple on intratumoral, is one, we believe we have to prove it in a clinic, obviously, that everywhere a checkpoint works, we should add value to patients. We have to do a clinical experiment, and is it like we saw hazard ratio of 0.5 in the phase II study on melanoma, or more or less? We are going to have to do that work, and we are doing. One of the things we are going to do now with our colleagues at Merck is to look at how do we accelerate new studies? Because we have nine studies ongoing right now, but the plan cannot be the same from when you believe something to when you know something. And now we know intratumoral working in phase III.
I think people will get a good sense of the data soon. And we know the mechanism, and we have always been a very mechanistic company. We do not believe in black magic, we believe in science. Based on that, what we want to do is to add to IO very quickly, and we have a lot of tumors where we know Keytruda works for the great work Merck has done over the years. We want to test that in the clinic with intratumoral. The second piece, which is also very important that David mentioned, is going early. Because in early disease, checkpoints have so long-term side effect, autoimmune disease, as we all know, that they are not used in stage I disease.
But if you think about where the world is going, and again, I'm talking about the next five, 10 years or the next two weeks, where the world is going is better and better diagnostic, earlier and earlier diagnostic. Think about a world where you could have potentially intratumoral as a monotherapy on a stage I lung cancer that is in phase III study right now or any other cancer, and you can get your vaccine at your local CVS because it's an IM. You don't have to go to a hospital. You can go on your way to work for nine dose every three weeks. How big that would be a deal for cancer patient. And we think lung is a great place to start because former smoker on X-ray, very easy diagnostic. You can catch stage I patient.
So we're going to investigate that as strategy number two pillar for intismeran. And the third one is to combine it with other agent that are helping patient because it is run, it's an orthogonal mechanism. We believe that adding an orthogonal mechanism will help patient. That's why we're going to go so aggressively look at that.
Fantastic. It's very, very exciting and obviously there's a personalized element to this that you've both highlighted that is critically important, and I have two questions kind of on that personalized element. The first is kind of there are partners that are involved in terms of sequencing and all the steps that occur here. I would love to understand first kind of how much of the proprietary work is within Moderna versus relying on any of those other players. The second is when you think about personalization, scale up is also really important. Can you just help us understand where will be the most likely bottlenecks as we think about the scale-up? Is it going to be in the healthcare systems themselves? Is it going to be in manufacturing? How do we think about kind of the path to expansion for this product?
That's a lot of questions. I'm going to try to give it a shot, and if I miss anything, I'm sure you'll keep me honest. The first one is very easy. All the proprietary information is within Moderna.
What we get from our partners, who are doing great work and very important partners, is sequence of a healthy DNA of a patient, healthy cells and the cancer cell. That's what we get from them, the raw data.
Then everything that happen after in term of selection of the 34 is ours.
Got it.
And we keep it under very tight wrap because I believe another piece that most investors do not appreciate yet is the tail that intismeran is going to have. How do you copy intismeran? How do you go to FDA and say, "A product that's generic, it's the same." How can you do that if you don't know what's in the product and every product is individualized? So manufacturing. So manufacturing, a few observation. First, this is a product where we only use from the patient the information of their genes. Right? We don't use any biological sample from a patient. So it's very different from other technology that are individualized that people can think about. The other piece, it's a liquid manufacturing process with enzyme.
It's not like making cell or whatever in biotech. This is actually a process you can compress, and I speak as a chemical engineer by training. You can squeeze things down, make things very, very tiny, which is what we have to do because we have to make product for one human. It's not a scale up like you have in traditional medicine. It's a scale out, which is the key of a game. How you scale this is make machines that are smaller and smaller in footprint. Why? Because our biggest cost is depreciation of a clean room. If I can do 1,000 machine that use 10 machine in this room, you can do the math on my cost, right? The second piece is cycle time.
Because if I take five weeks or if I take a week to make the products, you can do the math as well, it's basic math. My output has a massive impact in term of what happens economically. On manufacturing, I think we're in a very good place because it's all synthetic, cell-free manufacturing process. By the way, it's the team who did COVID.
Just as an important little piece, we scaled by ourselves as a startup company. We had never done a phase III, never launched a commercial product. In 2019, we made less than 100,000 doses across all our clinical trial studies, and we've got 1 billion dose out of the system 18 months after, and we had to build everything. Everything. That team, when we got the phase II data of intismeran, I told Scott, who was the site head of Norwood, "Scott, go take a month or two off. In the meantime, I'm going to look for a site to buy to build our intismeran.
Because when you come back, I need you to do the same thing on COVID for intismeran, and go do what you did to help so many people with COVID, with cancer." I think the biggest bottleneck is going to be the hospital.
I think the payers and so on, Merck is an amazing commercial machine. They have great relationships. They know how to do this in their sleep. It is going to be the hospital, and we saw it in clinical trial in the phase II, which is why in the phase III we did a much better job, is you have to help the hospital with the hands-off and getting the muscles of how do you get the biopsy very quickly from the lab, all the data of the patient, all the piece we need to be able to do our work as fast as we can with high integrity in term of data and quality. We have now teams that Merck and us are setting up as we speak to go and basically to set up hospital by hospital.
We are ranking the hospitals across the country in term of importance. We are just going hospital after hospital with that team going around and making sure everything works well in the system.
Yeah.
We built a great digital platform behind so we can track everything, of course, anonymous and respecting all the patient privacy, obviously. All this is a thing we did not even have in the phase III.
We did not even dream of having in the phase II. We are just getting stronger, going faster, reducing cycle time. Is there a lot of work ahead of us in manufacturing? For sure. Do I worry about manufacturing? Not a minute.
Mm-hmm. Got it. Super, super helpful. You mentioned obviously the scale is very different to the vaccine scale. The cost and the pricing is likely also going to be very different relative to the vaccines. Can you just help us think through kind of the economics of this, and particularly with the collaboration with Merck, how does this commercial structure work?
Sure. The commercial structure, you want to think about it as a JV, as a virtual JV. There's no legal JV, but basically, we are 50/50 cost in for everything. A sales rep, a clinical study, manufacturing, CapEx, OpEx, just cash, 50/50 cost in. At the end, 50% profit left goes to each company. We wanted to align the two companies, to be totally aligned, that there's no funny games or whatever. That's working extremely well. I have to give a lot of credit to the Merck leadership and to all our colleagues at Merck that are working with our teams. I think at this stage, we want to focus on the data a little more because it's tough to talk about anything with value if we're talking about data, right? Let's wait for the data, talk about pricing and other things.
We're focusing extremely on filing the BLA as fast as we can.
Mm-hmm. Fantastic. Intismeran is not the only oncology product, and I think you've both touched on that. David, can you kind of help us think through some of the next legs of innovation and kind of where the opportunity lies in the application of this platform beyond the personalized cancer vaccine or INT?
Yeah. Courtney, with intismeran demonstrating that cancer vaccines or cancer antigen therapies do work, the next logical question for us is, can you have a cancer antigen therapy, a cancer vaccine that is off the shelf? That is where our Lynch syndrome first comes in. This is a fascinating. It is a terrible disease to have. It is a high risk of developing cancer. But one of the fascinating aspects is patients share neoantigen mutations, these frame shifts. It actually lends itself perfectly to developing an off-the-shelf vaccine for neoantigens. We have an ongoing phase I/II trial in the U.K. with the ultimate goal of being cancer interception. This is Stéphane's vision he kind of articulates, which is, can you in patients or people, they are people, they are not patients—
Yes.
—who are high risk for developing cancer, can you prevent them from getting cancer? Which is an incredible vision.
That is number one.
Can I just add one or two things on this?
Please. Of course.
Because I am excited as this doctor on Lynch. Lynch is basically a genetic disease. It is one in 400 people. Think about the math again. One in 400 people have Lynch syndrome. As soon as I learn about it, I went to get tested. It increased for some tumors by up to 10x your chance of having cancer. When you see a lot of time, a 35-year-old having colon cancer, most probably you have Lynch syndrome. They might have added a lot of factors like the food and lack of sport and other things that we all know. But if you look at the data, and I have so many emails from friends, I had no idea they had Lynch syndrome. We know about it, or their spouse have it, or our employees. So it is a big, big issue, and it is literally Myriad as a test.
You can go do it for a couple of hundred bucks. Do it once in a lifetime because genetics. The idea here is a prevention vaccine.
If you are positive, you go to the pharmacy. We do not know if it is once a year, once every two year. David and his team and University of Oxford will have to figure this in the clinic. But the idea, you get this regularly so that you do not develop cancer. So think about it, one in 400 people, and it is exactly, and David, it would be good to have your thoughts. Possibly, it is actually the most de-risk application based on intismeran as with or across is Lynch.
Yeah, that's exactly right because these are neoantigens that the thymus hasn't eliminated T cells that are reactive to. To me, it's a high probability of success. Of course, we have to do the clinical experiment, but that's one that we're very enthusiastic about.
We own this 100%.
Yeah.
Think how it could help our vaccine business with retail pharmacies if we could work such a product into retail pharmacies.
That's our Lynch syndrome program. Then we have a series of off-the-shelf cancer vaccines, cancer antigen therapies, which are targeting antigens that are proteins that are expressed and shared broadly across major cancers. These are in phase I testing, and part of what we're trying to do now is to accelerate these to try and determine, do these work? There's a higher scientific risk because these are proteins that, in theory, the thymus may try to eliminate T cells that are reactive too. Although we do see, interestingly, T cells being activated when we give the vaccine. There's hope and reason to believe it can work. But those are the ones that I think are next on the horizon for us. Behind that, one of the benefits of our platform is multiplexing.
Although there are T cell engagers being studied in myeloma targeting single targets, now there are T cell engagers targeting two targets, we are the first company ever to multiplex three T cell engagers into one single drug. We have this ongoing phase I in multiple myeloma in heavily pretreated patients, many of them who've received multiple T cell engagers or multiple different CAR Ts. So a completely unmet need population, that trial is progressing well, and we'll share that data later this year. This is a sentinel program for us, this multiplexing T cell engagers, because like intismeran, sentinel program, if that works, it de-risks potentially other cancer antigen vaccines. If this multiplexing T cell engager works, it leads us to further invest in other programs for solid tumors in that case.
Then we have what I'd like to highlight also is our autoimmune program. Because in essence, this started as an mRNA company, a platform, but it's an immunology company with viruses, immunotherapy for cancer, and now for autoimmune diseases. At our Science Day in June, we talked about our in vivo CAR T program Which is heading to the clinic. Then we have several other programs for autoimmune diseases as well. So I think over the next maybe 12- 18 months, we'll be able to share additional progress on where we're going with these other exciting programs.
Fantastic. I have perhaps a quick question on PA—
Mm-hmm. Sure.
—which is one of your rare disease—
Yes.
—indications that will read out in Q4, and you have got MMA as well. What does a good result look like, and does this unlock a broader rare disease platform, or is this a two-program franchise?
It is a great question. Like everything we do at Moderna, we do not like onesies. I am not interested in onesies. Too much risk, too much money. We like broad platforms within the big mRNA platform. The way we have always thought about rare disease in the liver is if we could get into the liver, given the liver is most probably the organ in our body that makes the most protein. What we do at mRNA is to give instructions to your liver to make a protein, to give gain of function.
That if you look at just a list of disease that unfortunately many people have around the world, there is going to be a very, very large opportunity, even to the point that at some stage, not for today, for some disease because we are N of 10 or 20, do you do an INT-mRNA-like approach?
Go deal with that tail? That is more of a public health standpoint and doing the right thing for patients and the world. The financial opportunity is going to be on the front of a curve, obviously, and PA being one of them. PA for us is just de-risking, like we have always done with capital, being very disciplined because we have to manage technology risk. It was the first of another family of lipid injected IV, not IM, like in this brand and so on. So we have a lot of new things that we wanted to carefully manage and understand in the clinic, to then have a lot of assets going forward. For anybody who does work, as I said, to understand Moderna, you have to do work. I am sorry.
But if you do work, and you can use AI to help you do work faster, you can see we have published more than 12 different models of rare genetic disease in the liver. They are all published. Some of them are there for five or six years. Well, they already are going to the clinic. It is just financial discipline. We use the same lipid as PA.
It is the same as PA, same manufacturing. Think about the manufacturing leverage in terms of P&L, because we can do all of these off season.
Because today our cost of goods do not look great. Why? Because for half of a year we do nothing. Because we are in a seasonal business with vaccines. But what if you can start loading the factory in the months where you do nothing with making a rare disease product, and just use your fixed cost, and you can do the math yourself.
Rare disease is going to be important for the patient first, important for us. In term of outcome, look, I am a pretty pragmatic guy. Look at the phase I, II data and how you looked at one year, two year, three year. We have showed those swim lanes, and I do not expect anything different. Those swim lanes include the kids who are at the lowest dose because it was a phase I, II study. Despite the kids at the lowest dose, of course, we think being under-treated therapeutically.
If you take the kids at the dose as is in the pivotal study, the data is wow.
I expect great data when we get. Because again, it is not black magic. It is a rare disease. That is going to be really interesting for us. It will help of course in term of top line growth. Again, talking about long runways. As an owner, entrepreneur, and I have been here since the beginning of this company, I do not care about the EPS next quarter.
We manage EPS for next quarter, and the team has shown great discipline. I care about how do I create a 10x return over the next five, 10 years for all of the decisions that we do. I've done it since day one. I'm still doing it now, 15 years after. The way we think about this opportunity for us is we can help patients, we can have very long duration. Because if you look at our three businesses today, as we said, vaccine has massive long term because the barrier to entry is so high.
A billion dollar phase III is not for the faint of hearts, right? We have great franchise there for a long time. As we know for all the vaccine companies, the sales keep on going for a very, very long time. We talk about intismeran that maybe it's going to be really hard to copy.
Rare disease, same thing. How do you get a kid on another PA drug? Once, if it's approved, our PA drug is approved? How do you convince a KOL and parent to take their kids off a drug that is working to try a new drug that might work? How do you do that? Which is why, as we all know, the rare disease business for those companies and rare disease business, as Henri showed us with Genzyme, have also a very long tail. And so that's how we think about PA. PA is just the first, a bit like COVID was the first product of a company, the first vaccine of a company. PA is just the first rare disease in the liver. There's going to be a lot.
Mm-hmm. Fantastic. That's really, really helpful to understand the potential breadth of this opportunity. Perhaps just to pivot to, you mentioned a couple things. One on kind of trade-offs you're making internally, and you also mentioned on that long-term direction.
I want to ask these two questions, and then you can use the remainder of the time to answer. The first is, you raised recently, you raised another $2.6 billion in convertible notes only a few weeks ago off the back of the INT excitement. What does this money do? What does this afford you in terms of the trade-offs that you otherwise would've been making or can make now? And then finally, long-term direction. You spoke about it's not about EPS next quarter it's over the next 10 years.
So let's project 10 years into the future. What does Moderna look like to you?
It's going to be much more of the same at that faster cycle time. As you know, Mike, now you just talked before me about what Generate is doing. We are doing a lot of AI. We didn't have time to even talk about AI so far.
I could spend a day talking about AI because I'm so excited about what it's going to do to the field and to us as a company, not only in science, but also in our ability to process things much faster, to reduce costs, to have a much more agile company. As I've told to our team, David was in the room, and Lavina was in the room. When we announced to our team that morning, in August, in this run data, I told them, "Watch my lips. This is not our best product." And I believe it in every cell in my body. This is not our best product. It's an amazing first oncology product. And I say that because we are living in this very exciting time in biology, and AI is accelerating things so fast, which is, we don't know how our body works. We know parts.
But the next five, 10 years are going to be an amazing time in human history to be able to learn that in the field. What we have is a platform that is an information molecule platform. COVID was the best example for people who want to connect the dots. The virus was put online. Sorry, its sequence was put online. My guys developed, in 10 minutes, a vaccine in silico in a computer. It took two days to validate everything, because I told them, "You know it's going to be in the clinic in 60 days. Are you sure?" They look at me say, "What do you mean the clinic in 60 days? We don't do in 60 days run a clinic." Are you sure? It took two days to check and do models and 3D simulation and so on.
They came back, "Yeah, we're sure." By the way, that same sequence they designed in 10 minutes on the computer, I'm not exaggerating, it was a copy and paste of a sequence online. Literally. I mean, on pull-down menus in our system, choosing which chemistry for the mRNA, which manufacturing process, which lipid. It was a copy and paste from a computer online. That's how we develop medicine now. Think about people doing small molecule or large molecule in big pharma. Think about that. Why do I use that example? Because if tomorrow there's a paper from Harvard or China or Australia about a new gene doing XYZ, my guys can get on a computer and in 10 minutes have a new medicine.
Think about that tailwind we have on top of aging population with vaccines and cancer and autoimmune disease, which are all number one risk factor, age. When you think about where Moderna is going, I don't know precisely. I know it's going to be really fun. I know we're just warming up. The last few years have been hard, and I'm so thankful for the team that have worked with so much headwind. It's not fun when your sales go down 90%. We had the patent expiry on the company. Pharma always complain they lose one product. We had the patent expiry experience, - 90%, on the entire company. We restructured. The team worked really hard, and we kept our eyes on the long term, which is focus on patients, focus on science, focus on execute, collaborate together.
Because this platform is stronger than before the pandemic. Because it has been proven, and we raised a lot of capital through supplying the vaccine. Now we're just executing, and the world doesn't understand yet where we're going. Because most people are not doing the work. If you do the work, if you look at all the data we have, and Lavina and our team can help you connect the dots. If you do the work, where we're going is really exciting.
Fantastic. Thank you so much, Stéphane. Thank you.
Thank you.
David, I really appreciate your time.
Thank you, [Courtney].
Thank you. Thanks, [Courtney].