First cancer drug in 2026
Biontech is in the red – annual targets confirmed
May 6, 2024, 1:52 p.m
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Biontech continues to use the billions in revenue from the corona pandemic to become a cancer specialist. The group confirmed all of its goals after the first three months. Compared to the past, hardly any money came into the till at the start of the year. But that should change in the next few quarters.
The collapse of the Corona business and higher research costs caused the Mainz-based biotech group Biontech to make a loss at the start of the year. From January to the end of March, the bottom line was a loss of 315 million euros, as the company announced. A year ago the company had earned 502 million euros. Revenue fell from just under 1.3 billion to just 187.6 million euros.
However, the board assumes that Biontech will achieve around 90 percent of its annual sales in the last few months given the seasonal demand for Covid vaccines. For the year as a whole, the group continues to expect sales of between 2.5 billion and 3.1 billion euros. In the previous year, Biontech had revenues of 3.8 billion euros. Back then, Biontech had already felt the drop in demand for corona vaccines and the end of the pandemic, which is why sales and profits fell significantly.
Biontech is now concentrating on the development of its cancer drugs and wants to bring the first drug onto the market in 2026, as the Mainz company confirmed. Research and development costs rose by more than 50 percent to almost 508 million euros in the first quarter. “We started the year with good progress in our oncology pipeline. We have treated the first patient in our second pivotal Phase 3 study and aim to have ten or more potentially pivotal studies in the pipeline by the end of 2024,” said CFO Jens Holstein.
Overall, Biontech plans to spend an unchanged 2.4 billion to 2.6 billion euros on research and development this year. With a financial cushion of 16.9 billion euros, the group is well positioned for this, said Holstein. The company is also working on an updated, variant-adapted Covid vaccine that will be launched for the 2024 vaccination season.