Expanding the Vaccine Landscape with New Technologies: Q&A with Silvia Taylor

In January of this year, Novavax announced a partnership that would provide its Matrix-M adjuvant technology to Pfizer for use in vaccine development. Pfizer reportedly paid an upfront total of $30 million, with an additional $500 million agreed upon based on development and commercial milestones.

At the 2026 JP Morgan Healthcare conference, Novavax CEO John Jacobs said, ““This company is no longer about one product or one season. It’s about building a sustainable engine for value creation built on technology, discipline, and long-term partnerships.”

This news came during a period of regulatory uncertainty surrounding vaccines. Due to abrupt leadership changes at HHS, ACIP was forced to cancel its February meeting this year. In 2025, incoming HHS Secretary Kennedy fired the previous council and replaced the members with his own picks.

However, this hasn’t stopped vaccines from being developed and approved. In May of this year, FDA’s advisory panel voted to update COVID-19 vaccine shots to target the XFG variant. This update includes the vaccine developed in partnership with Novavax and Sanofi.

Silvia Taylor spoke with Pharmaceutical Executivex about the current vaccine landscape and how new technologies are allowing more players to enter the space and develop new therapies. She also discussed the regulatory landscape and how vaccine developers are working around any potential issues.

Click here for the video version of this interview!

Pharmaceutical Executive: How are new vaccine technologies impacting the vaccine space?
Sylvia Taylor: Vaccine technologies are really having a major impact on the vaccine environment right now. Since the onset of COVID, people are disproportionately attuned to what different technology platforms are in vaccines.

Novavax is twofold: one, we have a protein-based nanoparticle technology platform that enables us to develop vaccines for a wide range of diseases, such as COVID. We also have our adjuvant matrix, which is an important part of our technology platform.

Basically, an adjuvant is an ingredient that's added to a vaccine to stimulate a potentially broader, more durable, and more potent response. It can be added to vaccines to potentially lower the cost of goods, side effect profile, and the amount of antigen a vaccine needs.

That's an incredibly important component in vaccine development, and we're finding that our adjuvant, called Matrix M, has broad applicability in a variety of disease areas. We've already proven it in COVID 19. We have an approved vaccine that's on the market, and we also proved it in malaria.

There's a malaria vaccine that utilizes matrix M, and right now we're generating data and working with partners to understand how our matrix potentially improve the immune response of existing vaccines in their portfolios, or the creation of entirely new vaccines altogether.

Pharmaceutical Executive: How are policy and regulatory shifts impacting vaccines?
Sylvia Taylor: The policy environment right now is dynamic and complex. Certainly, in vaccines, the policy environment is incredibly important. What a lot of people don't understand is that in the biopharma industry, you must develop a product and have it approved, but in vaccines policy drives how people are actually able to utilize that vaccine.

Who should take a vaccine? How should providers administer a vaccine? Under what circumstances? How often? Those are the things that are controlled by policy decisions.

Policy is a really, really important component of what happens in vaccines. As I mentioned, what we've seen is that certainly there have been some challenges in the regulatory environment, including everything from the way vaccines and other medicines go through the regulatory process, and then how decisions get made about how approved vaccines are actually utilized.

As part of my work at Novavax, I lead our government affairs and an advocacy effort. The idea of ensuring a positive and productive regulatory environment and policy framework for all of the work that we have to do is really, really important.

Despite the fact that the landscape has been a bit challenging, we have been able to move forward in the important work of getting vaccines to people. Despite the headlines and the fact that it may be a little bit more challenging to get done what we need to get done, it's still getting done.

What I worry about are long-term challenges to public health and trust in science eroding over the long term, so those are the issues that remain that we as an industry really have to work on.

Pharmaceutical Executive: How did Novavax develop its strategies across commercial, R&D, and partnerships?
Sylvia Taylor: We are focused solidly in R&D innovation and partnerships. It's important to understand who Novavax has been and how we've evolved over time. We are a company that for several decades has been involved in vaccine research and development, so we really know vaccines.

We have our proprietary technology platform, our Adjuvant Matrix M, and when the pandemic hit, we were able to successfully answer the call and be one of the few companies that were able to get a COVID vaccine developed and on the market. We were commercializing that COVID vaccine on our own, but over time we realized that our best contribution is to continue to put our technology platform in the hands of partners who have even broader reach and have deep expertise like we do in vaccines to ensure that our vaccine products eventually get into the arms of as many people around the world as possible.

That means we shifted away from a focus on commercialization, choosing instead to partner our COVID vaccine, Nivaxivid, with Sanofi, one of the top leaders in vaccines. They now have the right to market Nivaxivid globally, which means we decreased our strategy of commercialization and increased the importance of our partnering.

Pharmaceutical Executive: Do you expect the industry to remained focused on vaccine platforms in the coming years?
Sylvia Taylor: Vaccine platforms will continue to attract interest, and when I say interest, I mean interest from other companies. We have partnerships with Sanofi and Pfizer. These are major players in vaccines.

Eli Lilly, the world's leading biopharma company, is now getting into vaccines themselves. So, despite the complexity and some of the risks and the challenges in the macro environment, what doesn't change is the fact that vaccines remain the number one most cost-effective and simple intervention to prevent disease.

That's just the bottom line. Vaccines are really important, and we see that today with current challenges with Ebola. Protection against diseases that can be prevented by vaccines that will always remain important, and what we're seeing is other vaccine companies continuing to invest in the space.

You also see investors continuing to put their money behind companies that invest in the space, so that is something that will endure as an important tool for public health.