Welcome to the flagship studio here at the 2026 JP Morgan Health Conference. I am here with our first interview of the conference, Stephane Bancel, the CEO of Moderna. It's a great way for us to get started here in the studio and I look forward as always to my conversation with Stephane and hearing about what's going on at Moderna. Stephane, I was reading your annual letter which I really commend to our audience. There's a lot you can learn and there were three things that you anchored in commercial progress, pipeline momentum and financial discipline. I want to ask you about each of those in turn. Tell me first about commercial progress. You've got some new approvals in 2025.
Exactly. Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. It's always a pleasure to be back. So, yes indeed, we had three billion approvals in 2025. And so that allowed us to have good momentum in the US. We announced at JP Morgan that we are $100 million better than the midpoint of a range. So we'd say 1.6 to 2 billion of sales and we announced around $1.9 billion of sales.
Thank you. We're super happy. In terms of pipeline, we had not only three products approved by the FDA in 2025, but we also had a positive phase three for the flu program. So this one we just announced last week. We filed in the US, Europe, and all the big geographies. It has been filed.
I saw that was a very blanket filing last week. Yeah.
Yeah. We try to always do that. We go by geography size and US, Europe, Canada, UK. Just go down the list.
Yeah. The whole run the gamut as they would say in Vegas.
Exactly. So, the team did that over a three-week timeframe just to file everything. And then if you look at what's going to happen soon in 2026, we have even more product approvals, more data. So, great momentum. And then cost. If you look at cost, the team has done a remarkable job. We took around $2 billion out of the cost structure in 12 months.
Two billion in 12 months. How did you do that? What were the guiding principles that led you and the team through that process? Because many biotechs are trying to figure out, right? Many pharmas are trying to figure out how to winnow through this market period on our most promising, most impactful programs. What can you teach them? What can you guide based on that kind of reduction in that kind of timeframe?
Yeah. So what I can share is that we first looked at the portfolio and tried to be very disciplined about the portfolio in terms of what programs have the most value, what programs are the most derisked, and tried to still keep a portfolio to manage risk because you never know what's going to work. So if you bet on one thing you become the average biotech company. So what we tried to do is keep a portfolio and we tried to really pressure test with the management team, with advisors, with the board what's the right portfolio to trim down. And then we did a lot of work on restructuring manufacturing because as you know during COVID we had to go with this crazy scale up, so we did basically the scale down which was very painful with both partners and with employees. And so we're in a good place now. We are in a good place. We're going to continue to do cost improvement because we're still negotiating with suppliers for better pricing. We're still using a lot of AI to basically reinvent work business processes. If you think about AI, our first journey was really around writing GPTs. I think we have four or five thousand GPTs in the company.
But now it's really about work across the firm, including scientific work.
Because we talked last year about sort of digital first. Yes. Are you using AI to direct scientific work?
Correct. So there are basically two big chapters for us in AI. The science inventing new molecules where we think we have the biggest impact from a value standpoint but the timelines to impact are going to be longer. And then there's kind of business: how do you improve manufacturing, how do you improve supply chain, how you improve quality, clinical trial, and so on, where you use AI to reinvent business processes where you will get some value, not as much as with science, but you're going to get quick wins.
So your senior leadership team, if they were here, your general counsel, your CFO, all of them are using GPTs of some sort in their areas throughout the company.
Exactly. Whether it's purchase to pay or in HR or in legal. So the whole company, we still have a lot of work to do, but it's across the entire company.
And that helps with your financial discipline.
You talk also in the letter about pipeline momentum. Tell me about cancer because that was such a huge area of promise in terms of the incredible results that we saw with your program with Merck.
Sure. So if you look at 2026 now that we spoke about 2025 a bit, sales growth. So the great thing about 2026 is we're going to go back into sales growth, which has been a few painful years coming down from COVID.
Where do you see the growth coming from?
So two things: new products and geographic diversification. So a few years ago we did a pretty creative partnership with the UK, Canada, and Australia where we basically built plants in those countries for long-term partnership of volume commitment and clinical trial participation and pandemic readiness.
I remember those announcements. Yeah.
Yes. So those sites have been finalized. So we opened Canada early September. I went to the UK end of September, Australia at the end of the year. So those three plants are open. So in 2026 we're going to have just a mechanical full-year impact. So even if the US is flat, the company is going to be growing. So that's really exciting. And then the pipeline. So as you said, this is going to be a crazy year for us in a good way because we filed flu. So we should get flu approved in some geographies. We should have flu plus COVID combo approved.
Is there a flu combo product on the market now anywhere?
But in 2026 there will be.
There will be. I'm signing up for that.
Yeah, but you might have to wait because it's going to start in Europe.
I'll go to Paris if I have to get my shot, I'll do it.
Paris, get a coffee or glass of wine. But in the US, we're still waiting for the FDA to tell us when we can refile.
Okay. But in Europe, we should get the MA approval this year in 2026. And we have still a phase three for norovirus ongoing that we should have data for this year.
Norovirus still seems to be a pretty significant threat in parts of the country and for certain populations.
Oh yes, it's a bit like COVID and the flu which is it's seasonal. The virus mutates and you have people at high risk, i.e. the elderly, people immunocompromised, young kids, the same thing. Some of my scientists call it the flu of the stomach bug. So that's for infectious disease. And then in cancer we're going to have a lot of things. So we should get first the individualized neoantigen treatment that we combined with Keytruda. We should get first the five-year data of a phase two study in melanoma.
And when will that data be available?
