Shooting the Messenger

Scalability and science at Moderna — how a small data team helped deliver a historic vaccine

Portfolio | Writing | Data Teams | Healthcare

April 2024

"Today is a historic day because it shows that collaboration and human ingenuity can overcome the worst enemies . . . we have been at this for ten years . . . Our mRNA is a modern approach to medicine, but it is just the beginning." — Stéphane Bancel, Moderna CEO

Here Comes the Cavalry

As COVID disrupted society in early 2020, Moderna emerged like cavalry coming out of nowhere. This small, technology-based company in Cambridge, Massachusetts had no products to its name yet harbored lofty ambitions. Leveraging cutting-edge mRNA technology, Moderna aimed to become a platform for developing medical therapeutics. This vision was rooted in exploratory research from the early 2000s at Penn, Harvard, and MIT, leading to its launch in 2010 with Flagship Ventures, as detailed in Peter Loftus' book The Messenger: Moderna, the Vaccine, and the Business Gamble That Changed the World.

Moderna's journey was marked by fortunate timing and serendipitous interactions. Discussions at faculty lunches and weddings, and a coincidental meeting between the Flagship founder and David Packard, were instrumental in the company's formation. Positioned in the innovation hub of Kendall Square, which thrived post-dot-com crash, Moderna was perfectly timed to respond when the pandemic struck a decade later. The company rapidly developed the vaccine's genetic sequence in just two days — a stark contrast to the previous four-year record — and initiated clinical trials by May 2020. By mid-2023, Moderna had administered over a quarter billion doses in the U.S., closely competing with Pfizer, a giant with nearly ten times Moderna's revenue.

Science

At the heart of Moderna's success is its unwavering commitment to science. Jason Schrum, the first employee, overcame severe hand pain from undiagnosed degenerative arthritis to make pivotal advancements in mRNA protein research. He toiled away alone in the dark basement of a generic Kendall Square office building until discovering a new method of production to reduce immune response. As the focus shifted from drug development to vaccines, Kerry Benenato took on the task of improving the delivery of mRNA, enhancing the safety and effectiveness of lipid nanoparticles — the fatty pieces of the treatment that allowed for more resilient distribution.

Over time, the company continued to speed up lab scientists' work. Rapid development of test vials based on different DNA structures — combinations of the letters G, T, C, and A — allows testing to take only two weeks rather than the industry standard of months. Bancel described the company's early approach as "spaghetti science": "you try something, if it sticks on a wall because it works, great. If it does not, you try something else."

Scalability

Moderna was designed from the outset for scalability. It aimed to succeed across a large, broad product range — a stark departure from the traditional pharmaceutical model. "In Moderna's labs, it's mostly about robotics and automation . . . a huge shift in capacity comes from dramatically more data and analytics," noted one industry CEO. This scale is supported by a lean internal analytics team which efficiently transitioned to the Looker visualization tool thanks to a streamlined data stack with Amazon Web Services. Carlos Peralta, Director of Data Engineering, described the approach: "Because this is an AWS-native platform we've found that we have to do very little engineering around the platform itself . . . This means less infrastructure to maintain, which again means that we don't have to hire more data engineers for ETL purposes." The data engineering team owns only the software, network, and infrastructure platforms while business users own the pipeline management creation only. A product-driven approach, rather than a service-oriented one, is key to scalability at Moderna.

AI-Focused Future

With the pandemic receding, Moderna continues to innovate in synthetic biology, developing personalized vaccines by analyzing the DNA from patients' cancerous and healthy cells. As the CEO recently described: "We basically start by reading all the letters of DNA of your cancer cell, then read all the letters of DNA of your healthy cell. We send both of them to AWS" to develop a custom vaccine for the cancers you are most likely to develop.

The company is also enhancing its team's capabilities through tools like ChatGPT. A recent partnership with OpenAI exemplifies Moderna's strategic use of its compact team size compared to traditional pharma giants. With new innovations in pharmaceutical R&D, the company plans to launch 15 new products in the next five years, including a treatment for melanoma.