By Jacob Wolinsky. Originally published at ValueWalk.
Following are excerpts from CNBC interviews with Gilead Sciences, Inc. (NASDAQ:GILD) Chairman & CEO Daniel O’Day and Novavax, Inc. (NASDAQ:NVAX) President & CEO Stanley Erck on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” (M-F 9AM – 11AM ET) today, Monday, January 10th. Following is a link to video on CNBC.com:
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Gilead CEO: Oral Version Of Covid Drug Remdesivir In Early Testing
Excerpts from Gilead Sciences Chairman & CEO Daniel O’Day interview:
O’Day On Impact Of Remdesivir
DANIEL O’DAY: Remdesivir has really been, has had a major impact upon this pandemic over the course of the past now close to two years. It is the standard of care in the hospital setting and in fact, three out of five patients that are administered to the hospital are receiving Remdesivir and that’s making a big difference for patients. It’s getting patients out of the hospital sooner, five to seven days sooner, and stopping them from going on to more severe consequences of the disease. So, you know, this is really a major impact particularly this time when hospitals are under such stress. And importantly, it’s working across all known variants today, including Omicron and thanks to the investment we made, we have you know, adequate supply. And you know, you also mentioned now the, the new data that came out and was just published in the New England Journal of Medicine in December actually just before Christmas, where a short course of Remdesivir therapy given in the outpatient setting is close to 90% effective at stopping patients from going into the hospital setting.
O’Day On Working On Oral Form Of Remdesivir
O’DAY: We’re also working on an oral form of Remdesivir. It’s going into early-stage trials now and what we know for sure after 30 years of experience in HIV, is that we’re going to need a lot of different mechanisms to be able to attack this virus both in the hospital and outpatient, and Gilead stands firm and committed to making sure those therapies become available.
MEG TIRRELL: And when you say oral, is that the inhaled version of Remdesivir or are we talking a tablet that you swallow?
O’DAY: We’re talking a tablet that you swallow. So what we’ve decided is that, given the fact that our tablet that you swallow was at about the same stage as the inhaled version, we’re putting all of our resources into the oral version.
O’Day On Cancer Drug Trodelvy
O’DAY: This is, this is a really important point in time for Gilead because not only are we the leading company in anti-virals, but we’re evolving to a company that now has a leading portfolio in anti-cancer medicines, of which last year alone we had five new FDA approvals, four of which were in cancer. One of which you mentioned TRODELVY which is a medicine that brings an anti-cancer killing agent directly to the cancer cells. And we’ve seen actually in late-stage breast cancer, hard to treat late-stage breast cancer, already it’s approved and been used in, in women with this disease and more than doubling their survival. So this is a medicine TRODELVY that has the potential to be used across many different cancer types.
Excerpts from Novavax President & CEO Stanley Erck interview:
Erck On Novavax Omicron Specific Vaccine
TIRRELL: How are you looking at whether you need to switch over to that Omicron specific strain and when that might need to happen?
STANLEY ERCK: No, it’s a great question. We’re gonna, we’re gonna decide it when, you know, as we talk with as we get more data, but as we talk with regulatory agencies and healthcare experts. It’s going to be a hard call because our actually, our 2373 vaccine works, works well against Omicron and it has very broad protects, that’s one of the hallmarks of our vaccine is we get, we get protection and we’ve been able to show it in our Phase 3 clinical trials that we get protection against variants and we get a very potent immune response against Omicron. So data will tell us whether that will, whether we’ll make that switch over or not.
Erck On Vaccine Capacity To Supply
ERCK: I think we’re in a place where we filed. We’ve got capacity and we’ve got global capacity to supply the US and so I don’t I don’t know that it’s, it’s productive to talk about whether someone could have done something better or not in the past year so.
Erck On Vaccine Results For Pediatric Population
ERCK: Well, I think you’ll see the results for kids in the next 30 days or so. And so, I think that all along with we’ve when, when the analysts have compared our vaccine data, our safety data to other vaccines, we will always come out on top on tolerability. And so that’s good and I think parents will, will see that that’s a positive aspect of a vaccine.
TIRRELL: You say next 30 days, which age groups is that?
ERCK: 12 to 17.
TIRRELL: I see and even younger kids, you—
ERCK: And we will start based upon those data. We will start to trial and we’ll go down to 5 to 12. So, so we’ll be stepping down throughout the next six months.
Erck On Combination Of Flu And Covid Vaccine Pivotal Studies
ERCK: Well, we’re gonna get data and the data are coming by the end of this quarter and based upon those data, we’ll still have the pathway to start a Phase 2 trial that will lead to pivotal studies. And so we’ve got a year or two before the vaccine could go into a pivotal study.
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