200 Technology Square, Cambridge 

While Moderna gained fame as one of the pharmaceutical companies that created mRNA vaccines against the COVID-19 virus in 2020, it has actually been working on mRNA therapies for a variety of health problems since 2010. The basic idea behind all of the company’s treatments is to use messenger RNA to carry coding sequences into human cells, where the cells’ own machinery follows the code to build the desired therapeutic antibodies or other proteins. The pandemic gave Moderna the opportunity to test this approach in tens thousands of test subjects and then make billions of FDA-approved vaccine doses, vastly accelerating the company’s programs. “We never anticipated this kind of an exponential increase in the possibilities,” says Noubar Afeyan, Moderna’s co-founder and chairman.

Guest speaker

Noubar Afeyan, Founder and CEO, Flagship Pioneering; Co-founder and Chairman, Moderna Pharmaceuticals