Denmark’s Bavarian Nordic has posted a 12.7% increase in pretax losses for the first six months of 2007 and a 116% fall in revenues but is upbeat about its future prospects.
The vaccine maker’s loss was 127.8 million kroner ($23.6 million), while sales were 51.4 million kroner, derived from the firm’s ongoing contracts (RFP-1 and RFP-2) with the US government health authorities to supply Imvamune, its modified vaccinia Ankara (MVA) smallpox vaccine. The decline was due to a delay, agreed with the US health authorities, for certain clinical studies for the second of the contracts.
These studies, the final design of which is ongoing, will be added to the third contract (RFP-3) that was granted to Bavarian Nordic in June for 20 million doses of Imvamune and the firm noted that “the majority of the deferred revenue is expected to be realised during 2008.” Advanced and milestone payments in 2007 and 2008 from RFP-3 amount to about $125 million. The Kvistgard-headquartered firm reiterated its full-year forecast of 380 million kroner in revenues and a pretax loss of 50 million kroner.
Bavarian Nordic’s new chief executive, Anders Hedegaard, described the half of 2007 as “an exciting and eventful period” due to the RFP-3 contract and the recent settlement of its long-running patent dispute with the UK’s Acambis over MVA technology. With that litigation ending, “we can now focus on other projects in our pipeline,” said Mr Hedegaard, noting that “our HIV, cancer and measles programmes are all on track and at year-end the number of projects in clinical development will have doubled to six”. It was noted that Bavarian Nordic’s subsidiary, BN ImmunoTherapeutics, has initiated Phase I/II clinical trials with its breast cancer vaccine candidate in the USA and Europe.
