mRNA Vaccine

The CEO of Moderna, Stéphane Bancel, claimed that in January of 2020, Moderna, in 48 hours, created the design of its vaccine, purely digitally, and “not a single atom” of it was changed from the vaccine that was granted emergency authorization by the FDA in December of 2020. ^{1 2}

The main reason for such rapid turnaround time was, Moderna had already run MERS (a similar coronavirus) challenge trials on animals, and found that creating the spike protein with mRNA was the always the most effective way.

While there was some luck that the coronavirus is a simple virus (i.e. not HIV), and generating simple spike proteins in the cells was sufficient to create immunity - the overall approach of applying a generic platform to drug discovery feels like a giant leap forward.

The technological challenge for mRNA was that, mammals reject foreign mRNA, often exhibiting fever-like symptoms. There are some hacks that can be done to get the cells to accept artificial mRNA. ³

mRNA vaccines are very easy to manufacture and modify, because the human cells can create many proteins from mRNA code. Once the capacity to manufacture mRNA exists, many proteins are possible to create. The limiting factor of mRNA’s ability to cure diseases depends on the knowledge of how a disease causes disfunction: with such knowledge, mRNA creating the protein(s) that cures the disfunction can be packaged in some lipid layer, injected, and begin creating the cure. There are a lot of different complexities of delivering mRNA to different cell types.

Moderna’s approach is to “diversify” its drug portfolio - by building such a generic platform, Moderna has been able to create 17 clinical drug trials in just a few years of existaence.