One evening at home, after a lot of unsuccessful brainstorming, Derrick Rossi took the dash out of the name his lab used for its work. Mod-RNA, for modified messenger RNA, became Moderna by turning the dash into an e. He has told the story in an interview with the New York Stem Cell Foundation.
Rossi was born in Toronto, the youngest of five in a Maltese immigrant family. His father worked in auto body shops and his mother co-owned a Maltese bakery. He grew up around animals, he has said, because an older brother kept bringing strange pets through the front door, snakes among them. He took a bachelor's and a master's in molecular genetics at the University of Toronto, and in high school a biology course had blown him away.
What is rarely mentioned is that his path ran through a false start. After Toronto he began a graduate programme in Paris and left it early. He later finished a PhD at the University of Helsinki in 2003, then went to Stanford to work with Irving Weissman on stem cell ageing. By 2007 he was at Harvard Medical School, trying to turn cells into other cell types without inserting cancer-linked DNA. In 2008 his lab found that modified mRNA could do the job, and the 2010 paper was named one of Time's top ten medical discoveries of the year.
The idea needed more than a lab. Noubar Afeyan, born in Beirut to an Armenian family whose grandfather survived the genocide, had left Lebanon in 1975 and gone on to McGill and MIT. He had founded his first company in 1987, days before Black Monday, and later Flagship Pioneering. He has said Armenians have a practiced ability to restart. In September 2010 Rossi, Afeyan, Robert Langer, Timothy Springer and Kenneth Chien founded ModeRNA Therapeutics. In 2011 Stephane Bancel became CEO.
Rossi left the board in 2014. By then AstraZeneca had paid $240 million upfront for a partnership and DARPA had given $25 million. The company raised about $2 billion in venture money from 2011 to 2017 while STAT described a secretive culture. In 2017 Alexion ended its partnership after safety issues stalled work before human trials. On 7 December 2018 Moderna listed at $23 a share and raised $621 million, the biggest biotech IPO to that point.
Then came COVID-19. Operation Warp Speed gave $955 million, and the vaccine was authorised in December 2020. Bancel's stake of about 9 percent passed $1 billion in April 2020. After the pandemic, demand fell: fiscal 2025 revenue was about $1.94 billion against a loss near $2.8 billion. In 2023 Moderna paid $400 million to settle a patent dispute with the NIH, Dartmouth and Scripps.
Rossi has described the hard obstacles in moving a discovery to the clinic as a concrete wall that can take years to get through. Persistence can do it, he says, but you have to ask whether you have the time, the resources and the funding to keep going.