Moderna: A DARPA 60-Day Pandemic Grant, Patent Fights and Cancer Vaccines

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In 2013 a three-year-old biotech called Moderna accepted a $25 million DARPA grant to develop technology that could suppress a pandemic within 60 days. Founded in 2010 by a group including Derrick Rossi, Robert Langer and Noubar Afeyan, its name blends "modified RNA" and "modern." The idea was a platform: instead of injecting a weakened virus, inject messenger RNA that tells the body's own cells to build a harmless target protein. Under CEO Stéphane Bancel, who arrived in 2011, the company quietly raised $2 billion in venture capital by 2017. Its rare disease work stalled when Alexion ended a partnership after lipid nanoparticles built up in the liver and caused toxicity with repeated dosing. Moderna still went public on Nasdaq in 2018 at a $7.5 billion valuation, then the largest biotech IPO in history.

COVID-19 tested the platform. Moderna had FDA-approved trials by March 2020 and an emergency use authorization that December, backed by nearly $1 billion from Operation Warp Speed and a federal commitment of almost $5 billion for 300 million doses. Revenue went from $60 million in 2019 to more than $18.4 billion in 2021, then fell to just over $3.2 billion in 2024 as demand faded. Arbutus Biopharma and GSK have sued over the lipid nanoparticle delivery technology, while Moderna is suing Pfizer and BioNTech over its own mRNA patents. Its bet now is a personalized cancer vaccine built from each patient's tumor mutations.

• Moderna's first clinical COVID-19 batch arrived roughly 60 days after the virus's genetic sequence was published, matching the old DARPA target.
• 2021 brought more than $12 billion in net income for a company that had never sold a product before the pandemic.
• The FDA approved its RSV vaccine for older adults, mRESVIA, in 2024 and an mRNA flu vaccine in 2026.
• In August 2026, phase 3 results with Merck's Keytruda showed a significantly reduced risk of melanoma recurrence, and the stock jumped more than 177 percent in one day.
• The personalized vaccine sequences a patient's tumor to find neoantigens, then prints mRNA instructions so the immune system learns to hunt those mutations.