Moderna, Inc. (MRNA) CEO Stéphane Bancel Presents at Goldman Sachs 42nd Annual Global Healthcare Conference (Transcript)

Moderna, Inc. (NASDAQ:MRNA) Goldman Sachs 42nd Annual Global Healthcare Conference June 8, 2021 8:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Stéphane Bancel - Chief Executive Officer

Conference Call Participants

Salveen Richter - Goldman Sachs

Salveen Richter

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for day two of the Goldman Sachs Healthcare Conference. I'm Salveen Richter, biotechnology analyst at Goldman Sachs and we're pleased to be joined by Moderna. With us we have Stéphane Bancel CEO of the company.

With that, Stéphane, thank you so much for joining us.

Question-and-Answer Session

Q - Salveen Richter

And to start here, a question on your modalities. You have established two modalities or two verticals out of the six, right now, prophylactic vaccines, systemic secreted and cell surface therapeutics as core. And can you remind us what this means and speak to the biological and technology risks that remain in all your exploratory modalities and the steps needed to derisk these verticals and move forward.

Stéphane Bancel

Great. Good morning, Salveen, and thank you for the invitation. So maybe let me explain the modalities by stepping back a little bit and reminding everybody that mRNA is an information molecule, which means that all the mRNA we use across all the products use the same chemistry, the same manufacturing process for all of the mRNAs.

And we believe it's a very important derisking, because as we know what kills most drugs is toxicity. And so, knowing that now with the COVID-19 vaccine we have literally a couple of hundred million dosing arms, that's a pretty big end to make us comfortable about the safety of the mRNA.

And over time, as we thought about developing the company, as we all know the critical thing to do with nucleic acid technologies, we've learned it with gene therapy RNAi, mRNA, genetics, it's all about