The Next Chapter of mRNA

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Inside the new manufacturing site for intismeran, a personalized mRNA-based cancer vaccine at Moderna in Marlborough, Massachusetts on Oct. 19, 2026.

It’s been a very good year for Stéphane Bancel. On a crisp October day, the CEO of Moderna, of COVID-vaccine fame, is sitting in his glass-walled office in the company’s headquarters in Cambridge, Mass., weeks before encouraging results from the company’s first mRNA cancer vaccine would become public. He’s recounting the biotech’s rocky road turning an unproven, scientifically dismissed approach—using messenger RNA, or mRNA, the genetic code that instructs cells to make proteins—into a platform for producing new categories of medicines.

Fifteen years ago, Bancel had his doubts. At the time, there were no approved mRNA-based products on the market, and most scientists would have agreed that mRNA was too unstable to form the basis of a new class of medical treatments. In fact, the entire biotech industry had bet—successfully—on manipulating another, more reliable genetic material: DNA.

“It was crazy to think of using mRNA as a drug,” Bancel reflects. But that was before a fateful meeting forced him to look at the genetic material in a different way, and realize that with the right manipulation, mRNA provided a way to make drugs that were never possible with existing strategies. Now, he believes that nearly any protein drug made today with existing, recombinant DNA technology can also be made using mRNA.

The company’s goal isn’t to follow the usual road map and make one type of drug for one disease at a time, but to build a new platform from which a variety of different treatments can be developed in a plug-and-play scenario—similar to how the computer-technology industry is built on the foundational hardware and operating systems around which a whole universe of software has blossomed. “mRNA is the information molecule, so if you find the way to safely and effectively get it into the right cells, you can unlock a lot of medicines to help people’s suffering,” says Bancel.

Moderna’s mRNA COVID vaccine saved an estimated 2 million lives globally—while earning the company…

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