The Messenger gives readers a look into the business of Moderna's pharmaceutical and biotechnology company and their new approach to medicine with mRNA technology. We get the opportunity to understand the science behind mRNA, which Peter Loftus explains well, and are taken back to the start of the pandemic to see how Moderna raced against time to develop, produce, and manufacture the COVID-19 vaccine in partnering with the U.S. government.

Thank you to Harvard Business Review Press and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

“The Messenger” presents how Moderna, a young biotech company, successfully developed the COVID-19 vaccine with mRNA techniques and became one of the most well-known pharma companies in 2022. Starting from the establishment of Moderna, the company has been fighting against the pharma giants in the world, and the pandemic accidentally gave Moderna a chance to launch its first product.

I enjoy reading this book throughout the journey, and honestly, it is difficult to put it down. Before reading this book, I had little knowledge of the vaccine development process and biotech startups in the US, but this book well-explained the process and dynamic of the industry after the pandemic. The author, Peter Loftus, is a journalist at The Wall Street Journal covering the pharmaceutical and medical-device industry. The book covers a wide array of topics, including fund raising for startups, negotiations with FDA and other officials, competitions within the industry, etc.

This book is great for readers that are particularly interested in the business side behind the vaccines; it is informational but easy to understand.

Thank you NetGalley and Harvard Business Review for this advance review copy, and my review is provided voluntarily.

On Friday, December 18, Carlota Vinals, head of regulatory affairs for infectious diseases at Moderna received a nine-page letter from the US FDA. Ensconced within the arcane sounding communiqué, were fifteen seminal words, “I am authorizing the emergency use of Moderna COVID-19 vaccine for the prevention of COVID-19.” For a start-up that was just into its first decade of operation, this approval culminated a remarkable saga of courage, conviction and chaos. Peter Loftus, a reporter at the Wall Street Journal covering pharmaceuticals, medical devices and healthcare, in his upcoming book, “The Messenger” lays out in riveting and revealing fashion the journey of Moderna from the prosaic to the phenomenal, and its metamorphosis from the unheard to the ubiquitous.

Moderna was incorporated as a company that banked on the success of a technology whose potential was just a tiny blip on the medical horizon. Messenger RNA (mRNA for short) is present in all of the cells in a human body. mRNA It interacts with other components in cells thereby aiding and abetting in the creation of proteins. Scientists at Moderna attempted to design each mRNA so that directions could be given to the cells to manufacture a specific kind of protein. mRNA is delivered by either injection or infusion.

Canadian stem cell biologist and entrepreneur, Derrick Rossi; American chemical engineer, scientist, entrepreneur, inventor and a man carrying the formidable moniker, “the Edison of Medicine”, Robert Langer, and Kenneth Chien, a Harvard Medical School faculty member, pioneered the establishment of Moderna. Travails, tribulations and knocking on umpteen doors later, the founders managed to obtain a funding for their venture from Flagship Ventures, a Venture Capital firm headed by a Lebanese immigrant, Noubar Afeyan.

Moderna began operations from a non-descript building in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Jason Schrum, a PhD holder in biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology from Harvard became the first employee and toiled away in solitary fashion from a basement. The hard talking, hard selling and mercurial Stephane Bancel was lured away from his lucrative job as CEO of bioMerieux by Noubar Afeyan. Fluent in Japanese, the Frenchman, was a calculated go getter who brooked no opposition in furthering the ambitions of, and activities at Moderna. When Bancel assumed office at his new company, people were offering the Science of mRNA, a measly 2%-5% chance of working. That was until employee No.1 Jason Schrum hit pseudo-uridine, or in commercial terms, paydirt! Pseudo-uridine minimized inflammatory responses in the cells and caused high protein production, while extending the mRNA half-life to about a week or nine days.

Despite intermittent successes at research, Moderna, even after ten years of operations, did not have a single product based on mRNA against its time. However 2020 and the COVID-19 changed everything. In tandem with the brilliant Kizzmekia Corbett at NIAID, Bancel and Moderna began a “Stopwatch drill”. Moderna would attempt to race against time in coming out with a vaccine based on mRNA technology that would be used to neutralize the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

An astronomical contrivance of resilience and research led to the development of the Moderna vaccine within an unbelievably short span of time. From Phase I clinical trials where the vaccine was given the plaid name mRNA-1273 to the emergency use authorization by the FDA, it had taken exactly 286 days for Moderna to produce a vaccine that would provide hopes to billions across the globe. The upstart had finally arrived! Laurels started flowing in. The Vatican in May 2021, bestowed upon Stephane Bancel, a “Pontifical Hero Award”; Noubar Afeyan was awarded the Lebanese National Order of Merit, and co-founder Derrick Rossi became the beneficiary of the 2021 Princess of Asturias Award for Technical & Scientific Research. Rossi by this time had parted from Moderna in an acrimonious fashion having taken up cudgels with Bancel and ultimately ousted by the latter.

When COVID-19 first raised its dreaded hood, Moderna had less than $2 billion in cash and 800 employees. The behemoth Pfizer (another contender for the mRNA vaccine) in stark contrast, had a burgeoning treasure chest of $52 billion in annual revenues and a mammoth workforce of 88,000! Just a year and a half later, Moderna would forecast a full year revenue in the range of $15-$18 billion, and in the process barge into the top twenty largest pharmaceutical companies by annual sales in its first full year of having a single commercial product.

The employees and co-founders became overnight billionaires. Stephane Bancel’s stake exceeded $12 billion, Noubar Afeyan’ s VC was richer by $10 billion; and Bob Langer now found himself the custodian of a newly acquired wealth worth $4.5 billion. This prompted some stinging rebuke from people such as Oxfam’s Health Policy Manager, Anna Marriott who viewed making such wealth as not only ill gotten but eking mileage out of misery. Moderna however, tried to get into the good books of altruism by establishing foundations and charities. However the contributions to such charities paled into insignificance before the humongous, jaw dropping profits made by the top brass at Moderna.

More than everything, the success of Moderna represented a new beginning and suffused optimism in the realm of medicine and biotechnology. The proven success of mRNA can only mean hope for patients suffering from cancer and other infectious diseases.

The Messenger – Harbinger of Good tidings!

(The Messenger: Moderna, the Vaccine, and the Business Gamble That Changed the World is published by Harvard Business Review Press, and will be available for sale from the 26th of July 2022 onwards. Thank You, Net Galley for the Advance Reviewer Copy)

I liked this book. It is well written, with a conversational tone. The book is a good look at the business side of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine but falls short on the science content, but what science there is was well-explained. There is also a good discussion about regulations and vaccine equity (for a good discussion of vaccine equity, see “Preventing the Next Pandemic” by Dr. Peter Hotez). The scope of the book is narrow in that it really is only about the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine and there is not much on the other vaccines, except from a competition point of view. There also wasn’t that much biographical information and I found that the book lacked a certain empathy.. Nonetheless, I found the book hard to put down and even though I knew a lot of the story through the news, it still read a little like a thriller. Thank you to Netgalley and Harvard Business Review Press for the advance reader copy.