EuroBusiness Media (EBM): Valneva is a leading European biotech company specialized in innovative vaccines. I have the pleasure of meeting with its CEO and President Thomas Lingelbach, welcome. What are your keys takeaways of these H1 results?
Thomas Lingelbach: Well first of all the H1 results show that we have delivered on our promise, in the sense that we have given a financial guidance to the market with revenues from €105 million to €110-€115 million for the full year, and we have shown more than €55 million of revenue for the first half of the year. More importantly, we have shown a significant bottom line result in the first half of the year, in that we have posted more than €7 million positive EBITDA, and overall a positive cash generation in the first half of the year.
This is a tremendous result from a financial point of view, it results from strong commercial performance. And this commercial performance will drive the company towards fully meeting its guidance for the year. And at the same time we have been able to deliver on our promise of R&D progression milestones: we have ticked all the boxes, one by one, during the first half of the year, including a zyka deal that we were able to close with the US company Emergent BioSolutions, which has been above and beyond what we had indicated to the market before.
EBM: What are your main sources of revenue, and how do you see them evolve?
Thomas Lingelbach: Well we have two commercial products right now that we are selling in the marketplace, both are travelers vaccines. Both travelers vaccines are very unique in that they are the only vaccines approved in their respective markets and in their respective indications. Those indications are cholera and ETEC for our product DUKORAL, and Japanese encephalitis for our product IXIARO.
Both products have shown an very nice growth in the marketplace, growing for example 17.5% compared to the first half of last year, but they are also on a very nice growth trajectory going forward because we expect them to grow further double-digit year-on-year, thanks to increased awareness, increased penetration and general marketing of those travelers vaccines.
EBM: With regards to your clinical vaccine portfolio you have very promising candidates…
Thomas Lingelbach: Absolutely! I would say we are most proud of our Lyme vaccine candidate. Lyme is a very serious disease, heavily spreading in terms of its epidemiology, and we are the only company in the world to have a Lyme vaccine candidate in active clinical development. We have specifically developed a vaccine to cover the different serotypes prevalent in the field of Lyme borreliosis on both sides of the Atlantic - Europe as well as the United States - and we are making tremendous progress in the development of this vaccine candidate. Just recently we received Fast Track designation from the US FDA which may help us to further accelerate the development to licensure and market for this desperately needed vaccine in a field of very high unmet medical need. For example, in the US alone, we have seen last year 300,000 confirmed Lyme cases, which means that by thinking and projecting in the long term a vaccine candidate against Lyme, we think of a potential market North of a billion US dollars.
The second product that we have in active clinical development is a vaccine candidate against chikungunya. Chikungunya is a tropical outbreak disease, that we have seen in different outbreaks in Europe, but also North America, South America, the Caribbean: it’s a mosquito-transmitted disease that typically shows flu-like symptoms but in many cases you see pretty long, devastating joint pain for example, and as such a vaccine is needed. Our vaccine is differentiated compared to other vaccines in development right now, in that it has the potential to provide life-long or very, very long immunity with a single shot.
We have also developed a Zika vaccine. We have all read about Zika and especially its outbreaks in South America. For this Zika vaccine we have successfully partnered, and with our partner Emergent BioSolutions in the US we are developing this vaccine further. The vaccine will enter clinical phase I very soon, and we expect from this vaccine a very highly efficacious and safe approach to Zika, given that it is developed on the back of the technology that we have successfully implemented for our commercial product IXIARO.
We have also developed a vaccine in the field of Clostridium difficile - hospital or community acquired diarrhea in elderly - and this vaccine we have developed successfully until the end of phase II, and this vaccine is now also ready for a potential partnering.
EBM: That’s all very impressive. Now looking to the future, how do you see the Company evolving?
Thomas Lingelbach: Well we would like to evolve from A leading vaccine company to THE leading vaccine biotech company, a company that would be commercially very attractive, a company that has clearly revenues in the mid-term North of €250 million, a company that has promising vaccine candidates all the way through to licensure and market, a company that is seen as very attractive - financially attractive - for shareholders and stakeholders, a company that provides a solid basis with commercial success, but also a company that provides huge upside and huge opportunities coming from its innovative R&D, coming from its development of novel products, and coming from its scale allowing the company to retain its position as the leading commercial-stage vaccine biotech company.
EBM: Thomas Lingelbach, CEO and President of Valneva, thank you very much.
Thomas Lingelbach: Thank you.
