Richard H. Hughes, IV, Member of the Firm in the Health Care & Life Sciences practice, in the firm’s Washington, DC, office, was quoted in Forbes, in “Can Vaccine Development Weather Political Storms?" by Christine Ro. (Read the full version – subscription required.)
Following is an excerpt:
It's been a tough five quarters to be in the vaccine business. Amidst federal funding cuts to vaccine research, attempts to reshape childhood immunization guidelines, and flip-flopping on vaccine approval, the people who research, make and invest in vaccines are nervous. …
Richard Hughes, a health lawyer at the firm Epstein Becker Green and previously a Moderna executive, is unsurprised by such decisions to pause work on vaccines for infectious diseases. "I fully expected [that] would be the case when you create this sort of unpredictable environment," he comments.
To reduce risks, Hughes believes that companies are "going to restrain themselves, even on late-stage assets." He anticipates that this will happen on both the R&D side and the business planning side. Already, the Australian company CSL cancelled plans to create a spinout vaccine division because of "heightened volatility in the current U.S. influenza vaccine market." All in all, manufacturer skittishness could mean the abandonment of promising vaccines for norovirus, pandemic flus and other diseases.
Thus, innovation is likely to suffer. "If we didn't have meningococcal vaccines or varicella vaccines today, this environment would not inspire companies to invest in those vaccines," Hughes believes. …
Health lawyer Hughes agrees that childhood vaccines aren't big earners. Some companies stay in the vaccine space mainly for legacy reasons, not for major profits, he says. But staying depends on the predictability of vaccine demand, for instance through routine childhood vaccination programs.
