Health
Shares of Mpox Vaccine Maker are rising as virus fears grow
Topline
Shares of Danish biotech Bavarian Nordic rose Thursday after the company reported strong profits and a large order of its mpox vaccine, extending gains this year as countries mobilize to combat an escalating outbreak of the disease in Africa .
Bavarian Nordic makes one of the only MPox vaccines available.
Key facts
Bavarian Scandinavian shares rose more than 12% in early trading in Copenhagen on Thursday.
The rally comes after the Danish biotech reported better-than-expected second-quarter earnings and said it expects to reach the high end of its full-year expectations this year, meaning the company will post full-year total revenue of about 5.3 billion Danish kroner ($791 million) ) expected .
It extends Bavaria’s year-to-date gains to over 55%, almost all of which has happened in the last month.
Bavarian too announced a contract for 440,000 doses with an unnamed European country for its MPox vaccine, the only vaccine approved for use against the virus in both the US and European Union, which it says will be delivered this year.
The shot – sold worldwide under the brand names Jynneos, Imvamune and Imvanex – generated about 680 million Danish crowns ($101 million) in the second quarter. said.
The figure, slightly more than the money raised by Bavaria’s entire portfolio of travel vaccines for diseases such as rabies, tick-borne encephalitis, cholera and typhoid, is down almost 50% from the same period last year, when countries were still responding on the 2022 global mpox outbreak.
Tangent
Shares of Emergent BioSolutions rose nearly 9% at market close on Wednesday. The US company sells Narcan, an opioid overdose drug, as well as countermeasures against health and safety threats such as anthrax and botulism and nerve agents, a class of banned chemical weapons. Emergent also acquired French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi ACAM2000 in 2017, a smallpox vaccine that could potentially be made available for use against MPox given the similarities between the viruses. The Maryland-based company has focused on running his business around this year and on Wednesday Emergent announced it had completed the sale of a manufacturing facility in Baltimore to Bora Pharmaceuticals as part of an effort to streamline operations. The sale reportedly closed for approximately $30 million. Emerging market stocks have risen more than 20% in the past five days and are up more than 330% so far this year, although even with the latest gains, stocks are down almost a quarter in the past month.
News Peg
World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus last week declared a public health emergency of international concern in response to an outbreak of mpox in central Africa. The decision followed a similar announcement from the Africa Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the continent’s top public health agency, which warned there had been at least 17,000 cases and more than 500 deaths from the virus this year. far. More than a dozen countries have been affected, although the outbreak is mainly concentrated in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Mpox, previously called monkeypox, spreads mainly through close contact with infected people, animals or contaminated materials such as towels and often causes symptoms such as fever, swollen lymph nodes and characteristic pus-filled rash. Although the disease is normally mild, it can be fatal, and young children, pregnant people, and people with compromised immune systems are most at risk for poor outcomes. There are two named groups of viruses that can cause mpox – broadly split into genetic groups called clade I (1) and clade II (2) – and the variant responsible for this outbreak is an offshoot of clade I called clade Ib. Clade I mpox has historically been restricted to areas of Central Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo and is believed to be more deadly than infections by clade II viruses, which were the drivers of the 2022 global outbreak, which mainly affected homosexual, bisexual and found other men who have sex with men.
Big number
10 million. That is the number of vaccine doses that Bavarian Nordic says it can deliver by the end of 2025. Two million of those will be available through the remainder of 2024, the company said, a figure that also includes the recently announced order.
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