Novavax Keeps H1N1 Swine Flu Interest Up (NVAX)
Novavax, Inc. (NASDAQ: NVAX) is proving more and more that it has become a real vaccine player. Today’s stock rise is attributable to a production milestone event in its Rockville, Maryland facility and it was accomplished in only 11 weeks after receiving the gene sequence for the H1N1 strain from the CDC. Investors saw the term “milestone” and traded this up this morning based on teh assumption that this is an automatic payment event. Shares are up 13% at $5.25 late morning but had traded up to a new 52-week high of $5.59 earlier.
The company said in its release that it was able to reach this manufacturing goal “by employing proprietary, novel production technology which is not dependent on growing influenza virus in eggs.” Chicken eggs are used to produce almost all of the world’s influenza vaccine supply. The company has also produced essential reagents for measuring the vaccine potency and it has plans to produce additional batches of the pandemic H1N1 VLP vaccine to support human clinical studies.
Also noted was a further scale up so that recombinant influenza VLP vaccine technology has the potential to expand vaccine surge capacity and significantly reduce the timeline for vaccine release. Novavax has completed a Phase I/IIa clinical study with a candidate H5N1 influenza VLP vaccine and is already in Phase II trials with a VLP based seasonal flu vaccine candidate.
Novavax said that it plans to initiate a Phase II study with its Seasonal Flu vaccine candidate in the elderly population during Q4-2009.
JON C. OGG
August 5, 2009
