Happy Monday, readers. I hope you had a wonderful weekend.
A trio of companies developing coronavirus vaccines saw their stocks jump on a mix of good news.
The most prominent of the group is Pfizer, which is aligned with German biotech BioNTech on a number of vaccine candidates. On Monday, the firms announced that two of those experimental COVID vaccines had been granted Food and Drug Administration (FDA) fast-track designation, which speeds up the regulatory process for a drug candidate. Pfizer stock promptly jumped 5% in Monday trading, a massive advance for a company with nearly $200 billion in market value. Shares of the much smaller BioNTech shot up 15%.
“We look forward to continue working closely with the FDA throughout the clinical development of this program, Project Lightspeed, to evaluate the safety and efficacy of these vaccine candidates,” said Peter Honig, Pfizer’s senior vice president of regulatory affairs, in a statement.
These vaccine candidates rely on an mRNA technology platform, which uses an essential biological building block in order to induce cells to create other biological materials (typically proteins) that can help guard against pathogens like the coronavirus.
Which brings us to the third company which saw a hefty market cap boost, albeit for a different reason. The bitoech startup Moderna Therapeutics, which doesn’t have any approved treatments yet but is one of the leaders in the COVID-19 vaccine space, spiked nearly 20% after Jeffries analyst Michael Yee projected that the treatment could bring in more than $5 billion in annual sales.
“We believe the Street will be surprised to the upside if the Covid-19 vaccine works, gets approved by early 2021, and there are multi-billion dollars of purchase orders from USA and around the world,” he wrote in an investor note.
The flipside, as Yee himself admits, is that those are a whole lot of “ifs.”
Read on for the day’s news.
Sy Mukherjee
sayak.mukherjee@fortune.com
@the_sy_guy
DIGITAL HEALTH
Nearly 275,000 affected by Houston-based medical billing data breach. As if Houston didn't have enough problems grappling with the coronavirus, Becker's Health IT reports that hackers have hit Benefit Recovery Specialists, a health care billing agency, with malware. The attack has reportedly exposed personal health information for nearly 275,000 people who the firm is now contacting. That information includes names, dates of birth, and for some people affected by the attack, even some Social Security numbers. (Becker's Health IT)
INDICATIONS
A coronavirus vaccine may not be a one-and-done deal. Multiple companies are in the rush to find a COVID vaccine. But a vaccine is only as good as the immunity it confers, which happens through the process of creating antibodies. And new (although yet-to-be peer reviewed) research from the U.K. suggests that COVID-19 infections can recur in patients who have already recovered, suggesting that antibodies may not confer long-lasting immunity. It's still far too early to come to that definitive conclusion, but if it holds true, it could mean that COVID is something more akin to seasonal illnesses such as flu or the common cold (albeit significantly more burdensome to patients and health systems). (Fortune)
THE BIG PICTURE
Patients are being forced to delay care as cases surge. The delay of so-called "elective" medical procedures as hospital systems are overwhelmed during the pandemic isn't a new phenomenon. (To be clear, many of these elective services are still pretty serious procedures.) But as this outbreak continues to surge across the U.S., tragic stories of people putting off care have surfaced. Reuters reports on some of those tales and statistics from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) finding that "patients seeking care for heart attacks dropped by 23% and stroke care by 20%." (Reuters)
REQUIRED READING
What I learned when I trained to be a coronavirus contact tracer, by Wyndham Robertson
Why slashing product prices is usually a horrible idea, by Geoff Colvin
Is it time for your business to hire a chief public health officer? by Erika Fry
