So if you think about Moderna, let's go back a bit in time pre-COVID to set the context. We built Moderna as a company building a platform company using mRNA technology. We believed we should be able over time to make a lot of different medicines for people. So we are doing vaccines, cancer drug, rare genetic disease, cardiac drugs. Of course the pandemic happened.
We had been in the clinic with our technology with nine vaccines before COVID. And so we did our best with a team and at the time we were still a small company of less than a thousand people to get into a phase three quickly and scale up manufacturing which the team did an amazing job. But of course if you think about it during the pandemic people needed two maybe three doses in 2021.
If you look at where we are now it's really about people at high risk. So the volume has come down a lot. So what we've done over the last couple years with the team is basically to rightsize the company to the natural demand moving forward like you have for flu or other viruses for people at high risk, people of old age and people that have other disease like cancer, cardiac disease and so on.
But our true mission has not changed. So if you think about it, we want to develop a lot of vaccines. Today we have three vaccines approved in the US by the FDA and in geographies around the world. But what we're very excited about is what else can the mRNA technology do?
And yesterday we were very pleased to announce that in skin cancer we were able to show that compared to the best drug available in immunotherapy, a drug commercialized by MSD outside the US called Keytruda. It's an immunotherapy drug. It uses your immune system to attack your cancer. We show that we had actually 50% recurrence free survival meaning people not getting disease coming back or dying from the disease thanks to our treatment.
And so we think this is really the next chapter for Moderna is oncology.
So oncology is likely to be the growth driver and the future for Moderna.
Correct. Because we have a lot of indications. We have skin cancer I mentioned but also lung cancer, gastric cancer, kidney cancer, bladder cancer and many more. We have a lot of different medicines in cancer coming and so I think a lot of growth is going to come from that. In the meantime, our growth is really about launching new products and also accessing new geography.
So if you think about it, for example, we should hear this year about the European Union potential approval of our flu plus COVID combination, right? If you think about it, flu is a much bigger market than COVID. And so by having access to a combo product, people will not need to get the flu on one arm and COVID in the other arm. They get a single injection.
The health ministers are really looking forward to this product because they want people to be protected. As you know, people that are high risk, if they don't get protected by having flu shot and COVID shot, they are high risk of being hospitalized. A young person when you're hospitalized, you think it's not a big deal. But when you are 65, 70, 80 years old with comorbidities, yes you get hospitalized and sometime in a week you lose 10% muscle mass so your quality of life can be from having a normal life to after a week of hospitalization for an elderly person your life is going from your bed to your sofa watching TV you have no more quality of life.
And so that we think we can really prevent that and in a theme of living a healthy life prevention is the best tool is why vaccine is the best tool.
Well prevention certainly is the best tool but you know you talked about how oncology is going to be the future and I know that you've been working very closely with Merck. Will that partnership continue or are you also looking at others?
So for this drug that we talked about yesterday and the one that reduced the recurrence of skin cancer by 50% compared to Keytruda, we are partnered with Merck across any tumor type in the pipeline. We have several other drugs that are ours that we might develop and commercialize ourselves or we might partner with the right player in a lot of disease including multiple myeloma and a lot of other cancers.
So what does the pipeline look like in terms of approvals and coming to market?
So this is a very exciting year for us. As I said we have already three products approved which is kind of rare for a biotech company. You know biotech company dreams of having one product approved. We now have three products approved. We have two more products on file, flu vaccine and flu plus COVID vaccine that should be approved this year around different countries.
And then we should get the phase three data of our melanoma study in cancer with Merck and that should allow us to file very quickly to the regulators to get the product approved. So we are hoping to be able to launch this product as early as next year in '27.
In '27. You know I also want to talk about AI and generative AI in specific and how you are using that as an mRNA company and you know what are the benefits of the results that you're already starting to see.
Yes. So if you think about AI, I think there's two big levers in our industry where AI has tremendous potential. One is inventing new medicine. If you think about biology and all the things that have to happen, right, to make one medicine, it's extremely complex. Think about what machine learning is very good at is training a lot of data at the same time. For example, to invent new molecules. And so our research team is working on that and has already had several interesting outcomes in that field.
The second field is more typical to what you see in other companies is how do you improve your business to better serve your customers, in our case the patients. One of the things we obsess about at Moderna is how do we reduce the time before we can file an application to the regulators to get a product access to patient. So if you think about it, it's a lot of business process with the company. How do you select a dose for phase three? How do you collect all the data that sometime take six to nine months for companies to collect to file to the regulator to ask for approvals?
What if you could use technology like AI to allow to combine those data much faster? Every day you save of filing earlier is a day where the product is going to be a day earlier on the market and helping families.
So are you starting to see the benefits of that? Do you already see a difference as far as your turnaround time is concerned, your filing time is concerned?
Yes. So we started to already see difference. So for example in our industry, one important process is called dose selection which is after your phase two data where you try different dose in the clinic. What do you select to go into the phase three, the big registration study that you will submit to the regulators? That's usually a very lengthy process. You look at the data, you have meetings internally, then you meet outside experts, you have more meetings, then you debate and then you pick a dose. That's a very big important decision.
Well, the team built a GPT that can do that in literally a few minutes where all the data of our products, past products, the data of competitors products that are public are all into the GPTs to be able to do the dose selection and that saves time. And so you have a lot of processes like this. So we're not yet at the stage where I can tell you we saved two years but we are working on so many processes to slowly shrink a week here, a month here, two months here and as you attack all those processes you reduce the timeline to be able to make the medicine available to patient faster.
You know you talked about geographical expansion. You have of course now got a presence in Canada, in UK and Australia. What about India? Is that on the radar?
So India is not on the radar for today but it will in the future just because you have so many very strong pharmaceutical companies in India and so we try to provide products where there's no alternative. But because of a strong manufacturing pharmaceutical framework in India you have those vaccine companies. When we get into cancer I think it's a different ball game and with our partner Merck we'll of course assess all the opportunities around the world and of course India is on our map.
