Sanofi grabs a share of Novavax’s Covid vaccine for $500M, eyeing commercialization, flu combination

Sanofi is hand­ing No­vavax $500 mil­lion up­front to bring the biotech’s Covid-19 vac­cine in­to the fold, with dual goals of co-com­mer­cial­iz­ing the cur­rent vac­cine and de­vel­op­ing com­bo vac­cines that can tack­le both Covid and flu.

The deal al­so car­ries $700 mil­lion in de­vel­op­ment, reg­u­la­to­ry and launch mile­stones, mean­ing No­vavax can bag up to $1.2 bil­lion to­tal.

The French phar­ma gi­ant is al­so li­cens­ing No­vavax’s ad­ju­vant tech­nol­o­gy for use in oth­er vac­cine de­vel­op­ment — ear­mark­ing $200 mil­lion per prod­uct — and tak­ing a mi­nor­i­ty eq­ui­ty in­vest­ment in No­vavax of less than 5%. Shares of Mary­land-based No­vavax $NVAX, which have fall­en pre­cip­i­tous­ly from its pan­dem­ic peak, surged al­most 140% at one point in pre­mar­ket trad­ing Fri­day.

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