BIOТЕСН

Moderna's Next Shot Two and a half years after its COVID-19 vaccine hit, the pandemic darling is still trying to conjure a follow-up act.

- ADAM BLUESTEIN

"SCIENCE DOESN'T move in a straight line," says Stéphane Bancel, "especially with cutting-edge science that no human has done before you." The 50-year-old CEO of the biotech company Moderna is familiar with circuitous journeys and unexpected turns of fate.

Founded in 2010 by a group of influential scientists from Harvard and MIT, Moderna spent its first decade pursuing research into the then-novel idea of using mRNA as a platform to create vaccines and drugs that essentially manufacture themselves in a patient's body. But by early 2020, it still didn't have a single product on the market. It did, however, have six vaccines in Phase 1 trials, and was working on one against MERS, a type of coronavirus. And it had built a 150,000-square-foot facility in the Boston suburb of Norwood, ready to mass-produce mRNA vaccines. Just in case.

When the genetic sequence of a novel coronavirus from China was made public on January 11, 2020, Moderna was ready. It tapped its mRNA platform to develop a new vaccine candidate, and on December 18, 2020, it obtained FDA emergency use authorization (EUA) for a COVID-19 vaccine, marking one of the shortest vaccine-development cycles ever. (The FDA issued an EUA for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine just one week earlier.) The company produced billions of doses over the next couple of years, driving annual revenue from $60 million in 2019 to $18.4 billion last year.

But as demand for COVID-19 booster shots wanes-and with a flurry of competitors now developing their own mRNA vaccines and drugs-Moderna finds itself once again seeking its way. For investors, who sent the company's market cap skyrocketing from roughly $6 billion in 2019 to $196 billion at its peak in August 2021 (it's now back at a more earthbound $50 billion), the company needs to prove that it's not a one-shot wonder, or even "just" a vaccine maker.