Maravai LifeSciencies: Trilink Biotech

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That makes sense. When you think about the future of the industry, do you think CleanCapping or non-capping will be the primary methodology that people rely on?

When you say the future, I think you mean two things. The first thing is, besides Covid, there are definitely other vaccines out there; there is the flu vaccine, there is Zika vaccine, there is CMV vaccine, EPE vaccine, but outside of the vaccine, there is also therapeutics, the drugs. Focusing on vaccine itself, I will say it doesn’t matter too much, because there are pros and cons and people are now aware of this. If you are pursuing Moderna’s approach or Pfizer’s approach, your eventual cost of goods is about the same. We spend maybe $1.50 to make each dose of vaccine; the price is eventually $25 2to $27. That’s the same as per these two companies.

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That makes sense. When you think about the future of the industry, do you think CleanCapping or non-capping will be the primary methodology that people rely on?

But that’s also because the requirements, in terms of quality and including removal for mRNA in terms of vaccines, is lower too. Think about what is the difference between a vaccine and a drug. The vaccine is trying to give you immunity over a pathogen, that’s all. But in the drug case, the drug is more likely to be able to bind to a target and, in doing those type of things, they want to go on stealth mode; they don’t want to cause any immunity at all. In the case of vaccines, immunity is good immunity. In the case of drugs, immunity is called immunogenicity so that’s a bad thing. You don’t want to have the drug cause too much trouble.

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That’s really interesting. There are two directions I want to follow up on that. First is on the IP behind CleanCap and how it, theoretically, mimics the structure of nature, and the second is on the vaccine versus therapeutics development and mRNA, generally speaking. On that first note, one of the things we’ve learned from some other calls is two experts in the industry have said to us CleanCap is, effectively, a copy of a natural structure and so it’s very challenging for anyone to build something in capping that is as clean and easy to use from a manufacturing perspective, but also effective to use from the body’s perspective. Maybe give us your thoughts on that statement there; is that the way you think of it? How do you think about what they’ve actually done with CleanCap?

My gut feeling is there could be someone who is using the CleanCap enzyme to do something, make a profit out of it, be sued and Maravai could easily win, but if it’s simply to make a new product out of co-capping and even to make another Covid-19 vaccine, I don’t think so. Please also note, in the market today, there are many companies are already trying to do other CleanCaps for co-capping.

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