RFK Jr. Ordered the HHS to Stop Funding mRNA Vaccine Development. The Edict Hit a Biotech Working on an Unrelated Treatment.

Sales of Pfizer and Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccines have shrunk dramatically. (Nick Oxford/Bloomberg)

A biotech that lost federal funding Tuesday following Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s edict that his agency’s pandemic preparedness division stop funding development of messenger RNA-based vaccines says it wasn’t working on mRNA-based vaccines at all.

The company, privately-held Tiba Biotech, received an email minutes after Kennedy’s Tuesday night announcement ordering the company to stop all work a $750,000 contract the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA, had awarded it last year.

Under the contract, which was set to expire in October, Tiba was developing an influenza treatment based on a technology called RNA-mediated interference, or RNAi.

That’s a scientific approach that’s been used in Food and Drug Administration-approved medicines from the biotech Alnylam —and it’s different from the mRNA-based approach used in the Covid-19 vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer .

HHS, in a press release late Tuesday, listed the Tiba contract as one of 22 investments in mRNA vaccine development the agency had cancelled as part of a decision that BARDA will stop funding mRNA-based vaccine development.

An HHS spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment about why Tiba had been included.

“Our project does not involve the development of an mRNA product and is a therapeutic rather than a vaccine,” Tiba’s chief scientific officer, Jasdave Chahal, said in a statement.

The company said in a statement that the contract termination “comes as a surprise,” and that the project had been successful thus far.

The potential mix-up raises new questions about Kennedy’s Tuesday night announcement, in which HHS said BARDA would “wind-down” funding of experimental messenger RNA-based vaccines.

Tiba’s inclusion suggests that HHS’s leadership may not be paying close attention to the science. The agency seems to have lumped the mRNA-based Covid-19 vaccines—which have become a political issue since the pandemic—with other technological approaches that have similar names, but work differently.

HHS said Tuesday that it was “terminating” 22 contracts “worth nearly $500 million” involving mRNA vaccines. It said that BARDA, which pays companies to develop drugs and vaccines that can be ready in the case of an outbreak, won’t fund any more mRNA vaccines.

HHS did not respond to a request for a list of the specific contracts being cancelled. But the contracts appeared to largely be early-stage efforts to prepare for outbreaks of potential viral threats such as the Marburg virus, new flu viruses, and other diseases.

The announcement undermines biotech efforts to get ready for unexpected outbreaks. Messenger RNA-based vaccines have distinct advantages over many of the older vaccines used to prepare for pandemics—including the ability to be updated quickly to match an emerging viral threat.

Since investors won’t pay to develop a drug that may never be used, biotechs rely on government funding to work on vaccines against potential pandemic threats that may not ever arrive. Much of that funding comes from BARDA, which in the past has paid to develop vaccines and treatments for Ebola, Mpox, and other viruses.

Kennedy now says BARDA won’t pay for mRNA-based projects. That means that mRNA technology, which blunted the force of Covid-19 pandemic, likely won’t be available during the next big public health emergency.

In May, HHS yanked a contract worth nearly $600 million from Moderna to develop an mRNA-based H5N1 vaccine that could have been used if the current bird flu outbreak in U.S. poultry and dairy cattle were to set off a human pandemic.

The latest announcement appears to target earlier-stage programs, and could put an end to the use of mRNA-based technologies to prepare for future pandemics.

In a social media video posted late Tuesday, Kennedy said that mRNA-based vaccines don’t work well against upper respiratory viruses such as influenza and Covid-19. “The vaccine paradoxically encourages new mutations and can actually prolong pandemics,” Kennedy said in the video.

Kennedy didn’t cite research defending the claim, and his conclusion is not widely shared among scientists.

Consumers have broadly soured on the mRNA-based vaccines currently on the market. Sales of Pfizer and Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccines have shrunk dramatically, and an approved mRNA-based respiratory syncytial virus vaccine developed by Moderna has seen almost no uptake.

The contracts that Kennedy’s health department cancelled, however, weren’t for updated versions of those existing medicines. Instead, the contracts funded experimental efforts backed by BARDA. The HHS statement only listed nine specific companies and universities whose contracts it had terminated, changed, or otherwise restructured, and did not respond to a request for a full list.

One of the impacted contracts HHS listed was with ModeX Therapeutics, a subsidiary of OPKO Health . HHS said it had removed mRNA-related work from an existing contract with ModeX. ModeX did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday. In 2023, ModeX said it had received a $59 million contract to develop antibody therapies to treat Covid-19. Though the contract did not appear to be focused on mRNA-based vaccines, the company had said at the time that as part of the program, “gene-based delivery methods for the multispecific antibodies will be developed using mRNA or DNA vectors to leverage the body’s natural protein production processes.”

HHS also said it had removed mRNA-related work from a contract with CSL Seqirus, which is one of the companies making bird flu vaccine for the government stockpile. The company did not respond to a request for comment, but in 2021 had said that BARDA was funding development of two pandemic influenza vaccines, including one that used a self-amplifying mRNA approach.

HHS said in its Tuesday statement that it had restructured a collaboration with a Department of Defense office that also funds research against pandemic threats for a project involving Moderna and the University of Texas Medical Branch. That project, announced in January of 2023, funded early-stage development of vaccines against Ebola, the Sudan virus, the Marburg virus, and the Lassa virus, all serious and deadly diseases.

Write to Josh Nathan-Kazis at josh.nathan-kazis@barrons.com