Although vaccine developers haven’t been in the limelight as much as some other companies recently, there’s been a lot of news circulating around one particular vaccine manufacturer. Novavax (NASDAQ: NVAX) has seen a slew of news emerge in the past days, including its recently Q2 results as well as some news concerning a potential COVID-19 vaccine. Shares plummeted after management confirmed it would be delaying the submission of planned treatment for at least one month.
The company announced that it would officially be pushing back the filing of its vaccine’s emergency use authorization (EAU) until October-ish. The main concern seems to be manufacturing issues, which are proving to be more difficult than expected. However, Novavax’s CEO said that it wasn’t a problem for the company itself. Rather, the issue stemmed from outside firms Novavax was compelled to work with under Operation Warp Speed. Novavax was assigned to work with Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies, who seems to be the culprit.
“We are going to take longer to file than we hoped, by several weeks, because we are in the process of validating assays, and because we don’t have control over all the timelines with the outside firms we have to use to do that, we decided that September is not the most likely date, and it would have to be around October or some time around then,” said CEO Stanely Erck in an interview. He added that Diosynth’s Texas facility “has been stopped because of quality problems.”
Novavax received just under $1.8 billion in funding from the U.S. government. It was one of six companies to receive such support from Operation Warp Speed. Until this manufacturing issue gets sorted out, the U.S. will be pausing all funding to Novavax as well. It hasn’t been the first time that Novavax has struggled to roll out its planned vaccine.
Novavax also provided an update for its second fiscal quarter just before the weekend. For the most part, results were lower than expected. Revenues are up more than 739% from last year, although they weren’t even that high, to begin with. More noticeably, net losses ballooned from just $18 million a year ago to over $352 million – almost a twenty-fold increase.
Shares are down around 19.4% in response to the news. However, looking at the stock since the year began, Novavax is still up more than 86% since January. Ongoing news of the growing number of Delta variant cases is helping push up pure-play vaccine makers like Novavax, as well as other smaller manufacturers.
Novavax Company Profile
Novavax Inc is a biotechnology company that develops vaccines. The company works in the clinical stage of development with a focus on delivering novel products that prevent a broad range of diseases. Novavax works together with its wholly owned Swedish subsidiary to produce vaccine candidates to respond to both known and emerging disease threats. The company believes its vaccine technology has the potential to be applied broadly to a wide variety of human infectious diseases. Novavax develops product candidates geared toward all age demographics of the general population. – Warrior Trading News
