![]() Moderna's speed is built on the decades of progress in vaccine development and genetics.Īt the basic level, vaccines work by giving cells a taste of a virus - just enough for our bodies to recognize it as an intruder and pump out antibodies to fight a similar invasion in the future.įor decades, vaccines have traditionally contained a dead or weakened version of the virus itself. How Moderna went from DNA to vaccine in 42 days "Nothing has ever gone that fast," he added. That speedy progress to get to the brink of starting clinical trials is "unquestionably the world indoor record," Anthony Fauci, the longtime leader of the NIH's infectious disease division, recently told The Wall Street Journal. Through this point, the company's value has been driven by the potential of its genetic platform, as the company has no approved drugs or vaccines on the market. ![]() Moderna's unique advantage is its novel technological platform, which also drove its record-breaking IPO for the biotech industry in 2018, in which it raised $604 million. Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel at the 2019 Forbes Healthcare Summit. It's led by Stephane Bancel, previously the CEO of a French diagnostics company. The Boston biotech venture capital group Flagship Pioneering founded Moderna in 2010. The French pharma giant Sanofi has more than 100 times as many employees - 100,000 compared to fewer than 1,000 at Moderna. At $9.5 billion, Moderna is less than 3% the size of Johnson & Johnson by market value. ![]() The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company is dwarfed by the size of drugmaking giants also hunting for vaccines. While the vast majority of cases have been in China, the virus has spread to at least 47 countries on six continents. The death toll has surpassed 2,800 people with more than 82,000 infected. The urgency has been driven by the rapid spread of the virus, which causes the disease known as COVID-19. The next couple weeks were spent on analytical testing before sending the first batch to the NIH. The company had the vaccine ready on February 7, according to a regulatory filing. Moderna designed and manufactured the vaccine even more quickly: in 25 days. For comparison, it took about 20 months to start testing a vaccine candidate for the 2002-2003 SARS outbreak after that virus was sequenced. Moderna needed 42 days to translate the DNA of the virus into a vaccine and ship it. Future tests would focus on whether the vaccine works, and would involve hundreds to thousands of people.Įven with a long road ahead, Moderna has beaten history in the race to construct a potential vaccine. The first study will focus on safety, with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) planning to administer it to 45 healthy adults in the US. This story is available exclusively to InsiderĪnd start reading now. It's still a long ways away from determining if it is safe and effective at stopping the virus. That biotech is Moderna, which earlier this week shipped the first batch of its coronavirus vaccine to begin clinical trials in people. Scrambling to respond to the growing coronavirus outbreak, some of the world's largest drugmakers have begun researching vaccines to prevent the deadly virus.īut a small, startup biotech has sped past them, becoming the first company to produce a potential vaccine ready to be tested in humans. The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based biotech is also testing vaccines for infectious diseases like the Zika virus, respiratory syncytial virus, and cytomegalovirus, or CMV. Moderna showed how its novel genetic technology can speed up vaccine development.It will require months of additional study to know if the vaccine is safe and effective in protecting people against this novel coronavirus. The National Institutes of Health will now start the first human trial in a matter of weeks, focused on safety.It took 42 days for Moderna to turn the genomic sequence of the virus into a vaccine candidate and ship it to US health officials.In the sprint to develop vaccines for the coronavirus outbreak, the world's largest drugmakers have been lapped by a startup biotech.Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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