Manufacturing Moderna's Future

In 2019, Moderna faced long odds of survival having failed to develop a successful clinical program out of the vast platform technology they had built around mRNA. Nearly overnight, the company skyrocketed to success with a vaccine for COVID-19, leading to an extremely fast ramp-up in manufacturing relying heavily on contract manufacturing organizations (CMOs) to produce hundreds of millions of doses of a single vaccine. However, on the heels of Moderna's COVID success, the company had more than 40 clinical programs in the pipeline, and as they moved towards personalized vaccines, had to determine what the future of manufacturing would look like for a company that needed to produce massive amounts of certain products and a handful of doses of others.