While Bavarian Nordic's public preparedness sales dropped in 2024, the vaccine specialist’s travel health business—which includes shots for rabies and tick-borne encephalitis (TBE), among others—grew 22%.
While the ebb and flow of mpox outbreaks may have taken a toll on Bavarian Nordic’s 2024 sales performance, the year also validated, in large part, the travel vaccines business the Danish company has been building out since the start of the decade.In the years to come, Bavarian Nordic foresees that more commercially minded-business taking the lead over the sort of government supply contracts that have been the company’s bread and butter thus far, Bavarian Nordic CEO Paul Chaplin said in an interview.Last year, Bavarian Nordic’s total revenue dropped 19% to 5.7 billion Danish kroner (around $527 million), the company reported Wednesday.That drop is largely explained by the fact that Bavarian Nordic’s public preparedness business, which includes its smallpox and mpox vaccines and makes up nearly 60% of the company’s revenue, plunged around 44% to 3.2 billion kroner ($295 million) last year.Still, there was a silver lining for Bavarian Nordic, as the vaccine specialist’s travel health business—which includes shots for rabies and tick-borne encephalitis (TBE), among others—grew 22%. “We started a journey, back in 2020 really, to become a much more robust, profitable vaccine company,” Chaplin told Fierce Pharma. “[20]24 was our fifth consecutive year now of reporting profitable growth.”That said, “the issue with public preparedness is it’s a little lumpy in terms of the revenue,” Chaplin explained. “It’s not a classical revenue stream.”As it stands, Bavarian Nordic assumes base sales from its public preparedness business between 1.5 billion to 2 billion kroner with “some spikes” from outbreaks of disease such as mpox.“To be honest, from an investor point of view, that is a very difficult one to model or to appreciate,” Chaplin admitted.In turn, Bavarian is looking to continue to expand its commercial business in earnest, both through the launch of vaccines like the company’s newly approved chikungunya shot Vimkunya, and by acquiring more commercial assets via M&A, the CEO said.Ultimately, Chaplin anticipates Bavarian Nordic’s “more traditional portfolio” of vaccines to become the dominant one, with public preparedness becoming a “smaller component” of the firm’s overall strategy.That should “create less noise in terms of the revenue swings that we see from year to year,” Chaplin explained.“Before 2020, we really only had smallpox and mpox, and it was direct sales to governments,” Chaplin explained. “We want to add more, what I would call, regular revenue streams into the business.”That desire prompted Bavarian Nordic to purchase its rabies and TBE vaccines from GSK, followed by a transaction for Emergent Bio’s travel health business in 2023, which added shots for typhoid, cholera and chikungunya to Bavarian’s vaccine armamentarium.“That was a bold move at the time, because we had no real commercial setup,” Chaplin said of the GSK deal.Since then, the company has built out commercial infrastructure in places like Germany and the U.S., navigated marketing during COVID, and is now in the process of expanding its commercial base into countries like the U.K., France, Austria, Switzerland and Canada, Chaplin said.As for why those travel vaccines are now proliferating under Bavarian Nordic, the shots simply “weren’t that meaningful to a company the size of GSK that had a portfolio of 30-plus vaccines,” Chaplin speculated.“I think they fit better in a smaller company like Bavarian Nordic than they do in a larger company with different growth agendas,” he said.Looking ahead, much of Bavarian Nordic’s focus in 2025 will hinge on the rollout of its commercial chikungunya shot. To build the market for Vimkunya, education of healthcare professionals will be key, Chaplin said, highlighting two types of HCPs in particular: Those who know about the virus but may not be aware of its severity, and those are largely oblivious to chikungunya altogether.While Bavarian Nordic is already seeing demand for Vimkunya start to build in Europe and the U.S., the company’s prospects in the States are slightly less clear at the moment, given the recent cancellation of a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee meeting that would have determined whether to recommend Vimkunya, Chaplin noted.As Bavarian holds out hope that the meeting gets rescheduled, the lack of a positive recommendation will likely diminish sales, Chaplin said. Nevertheless, the CEO stressed that the company continues to go full speed ahead with its awareness efforts.Speaking to the current uncertainty around U.S. immunization policy going forward, Chaplin acknowledged that vaccine hesitancy has been on the rise globally for some time now, with the issue exacerbated even further by the COVID-19 pandemic.Even still, Bavarian Nordic has witnessed a “rebound” in vaccine uptake in more recent years and is seeing “strong growth in our sector against the backdrop of some vaccine skepticism,” Chaplin said.Whatever happens with U.S. vaccine policy, “we will all be in the same boat as vaccine manufacturers, and we’ll have to adapt to the situation,” he added. Looking ahead to the rest of the year, Bavarian Nordic aims to grow earnings some 26% to 30% over that same span.As for what could be next in the company’s travel health portfolio, Bavarian Nordic on Wednesday unveiled two new early-stage pipeline programs for Lyme disease and Epstein-Barr virus.Despite high unmet need for a vaccine in both conditions, both candidates are backed by existing, validated technologies and Bavarian Nordic has been working on each asset for around 3 years now, Chaplin pointed out. Bavarian Nordic’s Lyme and Epstein-Barr prospects are slated to enter the clinic next year.
