Moderna Therapeutics is one of many biotechnology companies searching for a vaccine for the novel coronavirus. Who is Moderna, and what makes their approach different?
The Massachusetts-based Moderna Therapeutics worked with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and brainstormed and developed a potential COVID-19 vaccine in just 42 days.
And already, it's been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for Phase 2 clinical trials.
And they did this without ever having access to the virus itself. “Working with the NIH, we worked to decide and design the vaccine literally on our computers,” said Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel. “We never had access to the virus, but we had access to something we believe is more important than the physical virus, which is the genetic makeup of the virus: its sequence.”
What makes their approach different? Messenger RNA.
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