Patent disputes over boots are about to land, mRNA leader Moderna (MRNA.US) turns to embrace the "AI + healthcare" wave.

In Tuesday's after-hours trading in the US stock market, the leader in the mRNA vaccine field Moderna (MRNA.US) saw its stock price surge by over 11% at one point, after reaching a settlement with Arbutus Biopharma (ABUS.US) and Genevant Sciences (ROIV.US) regarding a patent lawsuit. As the patent clouds gradually dissipate, and with Moderna attempting to deeply integrate AI into its mRNA drug research and operation system through a collaboration with OpenAI, the market is pricing in the "mRNA platform + cutting-edge AI capabilities" as the core catalyst for Moderna's next stage of stock price growth. Moderna will pay $950 million in the third quarter, and will not have to pay any more patent royalties in the future. This expense will be accounted for in the first quarter according to accounting standards. As a result, the company currently expects its year-end cash and cash equivalents to be between $4.5 billion and $5 billion. However, Moderna still faces the possibility of cash flow difficulties due to the need to pay additional amounts, and has not completely overcome one-time legal costs and tail risks. The US-based biotech leader will appeal to the US Federal Circuit Court, arguing that its "government contractor immunity" defense under a federal regulation limits its liability, which would require its government contractor immunity defense to limit its liability under federal regulations. If Moderna wins, it will not have to pay any additional amounts. If the court finds Moderna liable, it may need to pay up to an additional $1.3 billion within 90 days of the ruling. According to the company's latest press release, the settlement covers lawsuits related to Moderna's Spikevax and mRESVIA vaccines, "providing future certainty for Moderna's entire infectious disease product portfolio, including mNEXSPIKE, mCOMBRIAX, and its future vaccine pipeline, without the need to pay any patent royalties in the future". In February of this year, a federal judge in Delaware stated that the dispute should be resolved through a jury trial. For Moderna's growth prospects, completely overcoming patent litigation and no longer having to pay any patent royalties means that the company may shift its focus on research and development pipeline to the "AI + medical" super wave. More accurately, the dissipation of patent litigation clouds does indeed help Moderna's executives to focus more on the next stage of performance growth engine in terms of management attention, capital allocation, and research resources. Will Moderna become the next target for the "AI + healthcare" wave? Since 2025, one of the core investment themes associated with "AI +" has quietly emerged, one of which is the "AI + healthcare" recently covered in research reports by major Wall Street banks. "AI +", which refers to the deep integration of "AI large models/generative AI applications/AI agents" led by tech giants like OpenAI with various industries to drive industry innovation and productivity revolution, is a cutting-edge concept. As the leader of NVIDIA Corporation, Huang Renxun, known as the "AI father", has repeatedly referred to "AI + medical science/biology" as the next amazing revolution in the global technology field at various public events. He even stated at a conference that the age when everyone must learn computer is over, and biology and medicine are the future of humanity. The deep integration of generative AI with the healthcare/pharmaceutical/pharmaceutical field has greatly promoted positive research development in multiple sub-fields, especially in new drug discovery, gene editing, disease diagnosis, patient monitoring, and medical image analysis, and it is expected that breakthrough research achievements related to "AI + healthcare" with significant commercial prospects may emerge by 2025. Demis Hassabis, the head of DeepMind at Alphabet Inc. Class C, and the winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, recently outlined the ultimate vision of AI at the Davos Forum: not only to send AI-designed drugs to clinical trials by 2026, but also predicted that in the next 10 to 15 years, humanity will usher in a "golden age of drug discovery". Hassabis explained that his Isomorphic Labs focuses on shortening the drug development process from ten years or more to "a few weeks or months". It is reported that Moderna has systematically embedded AI in its research and operations, actively cooperates with OpenAI to advance mRNA medicine, and has disclosed that AI has been used for experimental design, data analysis, prediction, production network optimization, regulatory document writing, and internal process efficiency improvement. From a technological standpoint, the forefront prospect of "AI + healthcare" is highly suitable for Moderna, as the mRNA platform itself is a highly data-driven, programmable, and optimizable drug platform. The "AI + healthcare" technology path can be seen as the "amplifier" and "efficiency engine" for Moderna's next stage of valuation reshaping, greatly enhancing clinical development, manufacturing, and commercialization efficiency; Moderna is actively trying to connect models, sequence design, patient stratification, production scheduling, and clinical development into a closed loop. If in the next 1-3 years, it can continuously validate this loop in tumor vaccines or more mRNA therapeutic products, then "AI + healthcare" has a good chance of upgrading from an "additional factor" to a core bull market catalyst for Moderna. Moderna has a great opportunity to truly make "AI + healthcare" the core valuation engine, especially in individualized tumor vaccines and platform mRNA drug development. The structural advantage of this biotech company lies not only in "combining the most cutting-edge AI technology", but also in its highly standardized, data-intensive, programmable mRNA platform company: its official materials define its research engine as "proprietary digital drug design tools + highly automated production facilities", and the individualized cancer vaccine project naturally relies on DNA/mRNA sequencing data and algorithms to screen for tumor neoantigens.