As Covid-19 started to spread across China in early 2020, Noubar Afeyan, chair of Moderna, received a telephone call. It was his chief executive telling him that senior public health officials had asked if the biotech’s experimental vaccine delivery technology could help fight the virus.
The request came at an awkward time for the decade-old pharmaceutical and biotechnology company, which only days before had outlined to investors its intended work programme focusing on a number of other drugs. It still had no approved products or meaningful revenues — $8.4mn for the three months to March 31, 2020, half that for the same period the previous year. Diverting resources towards a virus that was not yet considered a global threat was a calculated risk. But the prospect intrigued Afeyan and his CEO Stéphane Bancel. They agreed on the call that they would join what became a global race to develop a Covid vaccine.
“We didn’t know Covid was going to be a big deal but we knew our mRNA platform was uniquely tailored for very rapid execution,” says Afeyan. The phone call “was an intense discussion”.