Hitting the Books: How Moderna Composed Its Vaccine to Fight COVID Variants

The national news cycle may have evolved significantly since coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic – despite, at the time of this writing, rising infections and more than 300 daily deaths from disease. But that certainly does not diminish the unprecedented international response effort and the lightning-fast development of effective vaccines.

In The Messenger: Moderna, the Vaccine, and the Business Gamble That Changed the World, veteran Wall Street Journal reporter Peter Loftus takes readers through the harrowing days of 2020 as the virus raged across the globe and biotech startup Moderna raced to create a vaccine to stop the viral rampage. The clip below takes place in early 2021, as the company works to adapt its treatments to slow the spread of the burgeoning Delta variant.

Harvard Business Review Press

Reproduced with permission from Harvard Business Review Press. Excerpt from The Messenger: Moderna, the vaccine and the business bet that changed the world by Peter Loftus. Copyright 2022 Peter Loftus. All rights reserved.

Viruses of all types change frequently. They mutate by jumping from person to person. The coronavirus was no different. Throughout the pandemic, health officials tracked SARS CoV-2 virus variants first discovered in Wuhan, China, as those variants emerged. None seemed to be of great concern, until one was reported in the UK in December 2020, just as Moderna's vaccine was about to be approved. This UK variant appeared to be up to 70% more transmissible. It has been given the variant name Alpha.

Alpha has bolstered the possibility that the virus could mutate enough to become resistant to vaccines and treatments designed to target the earlier predominant strain. Or it could die out. But the variants would keep coming. Shortly after Alpha, researchers identified another variant circulating in South Africa. Beta.

In late December, just days after the United States authorized its vaccine, Moderna issued a statement indicating that it was confident the vaccine would be effective in inducing the necessary immune response against the variants. The original vaccine targeted the full length of the coronavirus spike protein, and the newer variants appeared to have mutations in the spike protein that were less than 1% different from the original.

“So based on what we’ve seen so far, the described variants do not impair the ability of neutralizing antibodies induced by vaccination to neutralize the virus,” Tal Zaks said in an appearance. virtual at the all-important J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in January 2021. "My definition of when to be concerned is either when we see real clinical data that suggests people who have been sick or who have been immunized are now infected at significant rates with the new variants."< /p>

Even if the vaccine was found to be less effective against a new variant, Moderna could use its mRNA technology to quickly change the design of its Covid-19 vaccine to better target a variant of the virus, Zaks said . After all, the company and its federal health partners had already demonstrated the previous year how quickly they could design, manufacture and test a new vaccine.

However, Moderna needed to perform a series of tests to see if its original vaccine offered the same high level of protection against variants as was shown in the large Phase 3 clinical trial.

Moderna again collaborated with NIAID researchers, including Barney Graham and Kizzmekia Corbett. They analyzed blood samples taken from eight...