Noubar Afeyan, co-founder and president of drug maker Moderna, says the technology used to make the company’s Covid-19 vaccine could change the way scientists think about therapeutics and vaccines for other diseases in the future.
“In fact, we’ve shown in many different therapeutic areas and vaccines that this kind of technology could, in fact, create a whole new portion of the medical repertoire we have to fight disease,” Afeyan told CNN on Friday.
Moderna is one of the pioneering companies in the mRNA technology on which the vaccine is based. The Pfizer Covf-19 vaccine also uses this approach.
How it works: Messenger RNA is a unique strand of genetic code that cells can “read” and use to make a protein. In the case of this vaccine, the mRNA instructs the cells in the body to make the particular piece of the ear protein of the virus. Then the immune system sees it, recognizes it as strange and is ready to attack when a real infection occurs.
“We wanted to do the work for such a molecule to become a drug,” Afeyan said. “The difference is that if it’s an information molecule, a code molecule, changing the code should be able to make any vaccine or therapy you want, that was the dream.”
He says this technology will change people’s perception of how long it should take to get a vaccine, adding that “the Covid-19 vaccine example will forge a new path.”
“It may not always be possible to go from zero to one vaccine in less than a year, but certainly the five to ten years it used to take were based on older technology and also, I will say, the assumption that it has taken so long. time, which we no longer have to do, ”he said.
Some context: The FDA’s advisory committee on vaccines and related biological products met Thursday on Moderna’s vaccine and is expected to authorize it for emergency use in the coming days. Once it does, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar says the federal government has 5.9 million doses ready to be shipped.
Check out the co-founder of Moderna: