Three Years of War Changed What Governments Buy. One Player is Already Winning Contracts (NASDAQ: MDWD)

WSW, NY, July 2nd, 2026, FinanceWire

Three years of war in Ukraine and the Middle East taught governments exactly what to stockpile. The first lesson was kinetic - and drone, missile, and surveillance stocks ripped. The second lesson may now be landing, and it appears to draw attention to a small biotech most have never come across: MediWound (NASDAQ: MDWD).

Every modern war teaches governments what to stockpile. The first lesson of the past three years - Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, Iran - was that the kinetic side of defense had been underfunded for a decade. Drones, missiles, AI-enabled surveillance, integrated air defense. Markets priced that lesson hard. Palantir (NASDAQ: PLTR) is up roughly tenfold. Lockheed, RTX, Elbit (NASDAQ: ESLT), Kratos (NASDAQ: KTOS) - all multi-baggers off their pre-Ukraine lows.

But generals fight the next war with lessons from the last one. And the lesson now coming into focus, after three years of real-world combat data from two active theaters, is that the post-blast medical layer is the bottleneck nobody stockpiled for.

The injury profile has shifted in ways that matter. Frontline reporting from Ukraine describes a war defined by blasts, fragmentation, and shrapnel rather than conventional gunshot wounds. IDF medical data published in the Journal of Burn Care & Research documented 249 burn casualties among 2,627 recorded personnel during the Gaza ground campaign - roughly a 9.5% burn share, materially higher than historical conflicts. Peer-reviewed military burn-care analyses (including U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research data) consistently place burns at 5 to 20% of the combat injury burden across recent conflicts, with the Gaza ground-campaign rate sitting in the upper half of that range. But burns are only one part of the modern war injury picture. Shrapnel and blast injuries combined make up around 61% of combat casualties. A prospective study published in the Journal of Burn Care & Research in December 2025, conducted at Sheba Medical Center's National Burn Center in 15 patients with traumatic tattoos from friction and blast injuries, reported a 92.5% reduction in pigmented wound surface after NexoBrid application within 24 hours of injury. These, along with severe burns, are all potential applications for NexoBrid and account for 70+% of modern combat injuries.

Governments are already moving on what those numbers imply. The European Commission allocated €690 million in late 2023 to build rescEU strategic reserves of medical and CBRN response items. The EU launched a formal Stockpiling Strategy in July 2025. The NATO Hague Summit set a new 3.5% GDP defense target — and NATO's updated framework now permits civil preparedness and resilience spending to count toward those commitments, dramatically expanding the addressable budget for medical stockpiling. BARDA's own base budget has grown from roughly $670 million in FY2014 to over $1 billion today, and COVID showed the agency can deploy more than $32 billion when the threat is real.

In April, the U.S. moved decisively. BARDA awarded a single ten-year contract worth up to $197 million to procure, stockpile, and further develop one specific drug for mass-casualty burn preparedness. Not a vaccine. Not an antibody. A topical enzymatic gel that dissolves dead burn tissue in a four-hour application - no operating room required. In a mass-casualty event where surgical capacity is the bottleneck, that is the difference between treating everyone and triaging the ones you can't save.

The drug is NexoBrid. The company behind it is MediWound (NASDAQ: MDWD).

Over the past decade, BARDA put roughly $120 million of non-dilutive funding into NexoBrid's development. The U.S. Department of Defense separately funded a room-temperature-stable formulation built for battlefield conditions. The drug sits in the U.S. Strategic National Stockpile. April's award adds another $197 million across procurement, a U.S. manufacturing build-out, a field-deployable formulation, and a blast-trauma indication. MediWound has expanded its engagement with Europe's preparedness infrastructure. The company recently shared that it has been selected to join the European Commission's HERA Joint Industrial Cooperation Forum (ICF), an industry body that brings together companies and public-sector stakeholders to support Europe's medical countermeasure preparedness, supply resilience, and emergency-response planning. And on its May 7 earnings call, MediWound's U.S. partner Vericel (NASDAQ: VCEL) raised burn-care revenue guidance and attributed several million of the lift directly to additional BARDA-funded NexoBrid procurement landing in the second half of 2026. The federal franchise stopped being theoretical. It's now a number in a public partner's published guidance.

If the story stopped there, MediWound would already be positioned as potentially one of the most interesting plays on the medical-preparedness wave defense investors haven't repriced. But MediWound’s second asset targets an even bigger market.

The larger asset is EscharEx - the same enzymatic platform, but redirected at chronic wounds. The U.S. addressable market is roughly $2.5 billion, currently served by a single FDA-approved enzymatic drug last approved in 1965. A peer-reviewed post hoc analysis from MediWound's Phase II ChronEx trial, published in Wounds, found that 63% of EscharEx-treated patients achieved complete debridement within two weeks. Patients in the same trial who received the incumbent collagenase (SANTYL): zero. Phase III is enrolling now, with an interim sample-size assessment and enrollment completion expected by the end of the first quarter of 2027 and almost every major name in advanced wound care - Mölnlycke, Solventum, MIMEDX, Coloplast/Kerecis, Convatec, Essity, B. Braun, Medline – are already participating as research collaborators.

A soft Q1, driven by BARDA contract timing and shipment delays tied to the regional conflict, pulled the stock back from earlier-year highs. The shipments have been completed. The contract is flowing. The interim readout sits less than a year out, putting that catalyst within a window the broader market might not yet have repriced.

Drones got the first wave. The medical layer may be the second. The biotech that appears positioned at the center of it trades for less than the headline value of a single one of the government contracts it has already won.

Recent News Highlights From MediWound (Nasdaq:MDWD)

MediWound to Report First Quarter 2026 Financial Results

Newly Published U.S. Expert Consensus Aligns with MediWound’s Strategy for Chronic Wound Debridement

MediWound to Present New EscharEx Data at Leading Wound Care Conferences

MediWound Reports BARDA Contract Award to Vericel for NexoBrid Valued at up to $197 Million

MediWound Files Annual Report on Form 20-F

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