It wasn’t magic that allowed Moderna to launch its COVID-19 vaccine in less than a year. In fact, the company successfully designed its coronavirus vaccine with dizzying speed thanks to artificial intelligence. According to Moderna CIO Brad Miller, once the company attained the sequence of the virus, it completed the design for its highly effective vaccine in a mere two hours. Miller has a lot more to say about AI, machine learning and other technologies as pharmaceutical businesses race to save lives threatened by cancer and scores of other critical illnesses. In this episode of CES Tech Talk, key takeaways include these:

• Developing medicines is like building software; for example, both employ platforms as the foundational operating system.
  
  
• Because Moderna is a platform company, it used the mRNA platform built for earlier research to speed delivery of the COVID-19 vaccine. The highly efficient approach is also used for investigational mRNA medicines that could treat diseases ranging from flu to cancer.
  
  
• AI is programmed into Moderna platforms, and is used extensively across the company. Because the tech is so central to Moderna’s work, Miller offers best practices gleaned from long experience. Check out his comments on the company’s “AI Academy” and Moderna's AI application, mChat, for improving employees’ understanding of AI.

Moderna is ALL ON for CES 2024. Stephen Hoge, Moderna president, will discuss AI in a speaking engagement on Thursday, January 11. Don’t miss his session, “The Future of Medicine: Individualized Treatments,” at 9:00 a.m. PT.