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.
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.
In just over a decade, mRNA has gone from molecular misfit to biomedical golden child, in no small part because of Bancel’s efforts at Moderna to prove the naysayers wrong. “At the beginning, it was either zero drugs, or we find a way to climb this mRNA mountain and make a lot of drugs,” says Bancel.
That’s what Bancel saw in mRNA more than a decade ago: an untapped vein of therapeutic ore. With mRNA, once it’s properly instructed to make the right proteins to fight a virus, fix a genetic disease, or tackle a tumor, the human body becomes its own treatment factory.
Stéphane Bancel, CEO of Moderna, in the Moderna headquarters office in Cambridge, Mass. on Oct. 19, 2026. —Tony Luong for TIME
Born in Marseilles, Bancel grew up with a strong interest in math and science, fueled in part by his father, an engineer who was always fixing things around the house. “We used to sail in the summer, and one summer my brother and father and I sailed from Marseilles to Mallorca—a two-day trip—and the engine broke in the middle of the water in the middle of the night,” he says. “I remember we were holding the flashlight above him, and he was fixing the engine by himself.”
In 2006, he became CEO of the French diagnostics company bioMérieux. He was working in the company’s Boston office in 2011 when he got a call from his friend Noubar Afeyan, founder of Flagship Pioneering, a venture-capital firm and health-startup incubator. Bancel served on the boards of several of Afeyan’s startups and had already turned down multiple offers to lead some of the new companies. But Afeyan thought he finally had one that might entice his friend.
Up to that point, the biotech industry was focused on manipulating DNA and making products to work on molecules that cells secreted—all in cell cultures using bacteria or viruses that were genetically engineered to produce the molecule in question. mRNA, on the other hand, works inside of cells, temporarily adding new genetic instructions for the cells to make new proteins, which could replace missing ones in certain diseases. In the case of infectious diseases or cancer, it could theoretically make proteins to stimulate the immune system.
The chance to build something in biotech from the ground up and figure it out along the way proved too tempting for the engineer in Bancel. In 2011, the company went from being called LS18—short for Life Sciences 18 in Flagship’s ledger of startups—to Moderna, a mash-up of “modified RNA,” with Bancel as its first CEO.
Moderna spent its first few years in stealth mode, with no website, to the point that media and market watchers called the company suspiciously secretive. Analogies were drawn to another startup: the blood-diagnostic company Theranos, which was equally private about its product and ultimately turned out to be fraudulent. At the time, Bancel shrugged off the comparison, saying he didn’t want the world to watch Moderna’s teenage years, as the company developed the technology he was convinced would change medicine.
What inspired Bancel to keep going was the magic trick of viruses, which could essentially do what Moderna was trying to do: introduce new genetic information into a cell and thus co-opt it to make a specific protein. “If you look at nature and learn from nature that it’s possible, then your willingness and your appetite to invest capital is much stronger,” he says. “That’s why I tell my engineers, ‘Yes you can—you just don’t know how yet.’”
Inside the new manufacturing site for intismeran, a personalized mRNA-based cancer vaccine, at Moderna in Marlborough, Mass. on Oct. 19, 2026. —Tony Luong for TIME“It’s a very hard place to work,” Bancel acknowledges of the intense environment to produce results. “We debate and debate,” he says. “Every voice makes the discussion better. But it’s not for everyone.”
Dr. Stephen Hoge, an emergency-room physician turned health care consultant at McKinsey, arrived at Moderna in 2012 to help the company prioritize specific disease areas. Hoge liked what he saw during his months at the company and accepted the board’s invitation to join, eventually becoming president in 2015. “I think of him as a brother from another mother,” says Bancel. “If he tells me we need to jump out the window -because it’s good for Moderna, I would jump with him, and on the way down I would ask, ‘Why are we jumping?’” The two often hold contrasting points of view, leading to legendary debates that both see as key to Moderna’s success. “Stéphane and I have argued through the entire history of the company,” says Hoge. “And we often joke that if one of us takes one side, then the other has to take the other. But it’s been part of our success that we often disagree to find the truth in between.” Hoge championed using mRNA in cancer, but also approved a side project exploring how mRNA could work in a vaccine for infectious diseases. It made sense that the drawback that had led many to dismiss mRNA as a treatment—its aggressive stimulation of the immune response—could be an advantage in a vaccine. The first impressive results showed that all of the mice inoculated with the mRNA flu shot had high levels of antibodies to fight influenza weeks after being challenged with high doses of the virus, while the unvaccinated mice did not. The results were exciting enough to add a more robust program on infectious-disease vaccines to Moderna’s port-folio, which would later form the foundation of the company’s COVID vaccine.
“He said, ‘I think we should do a cancer vaccine that is individualized because we can sequence for cheap now the healthy cell and the cancer cell from a biopsy, and we can make an mRNA coding just for the mutations in the cancer,’” Bancel remembers Zaks telling him. “‘We can inject it and combine it with a checkpoint inhibitor, and I think it has a very high chance of working.’ And that was the first day I thought about the idea of intismeran.”
Bancel and the board were in. To fund the program, Bancel reached out to Merck, which makes pembrolizumab (Keytruda), a checkpoint inhibitor. Bancel had already invested in a manufacturing facility in Norwood, Mass., about 45 minutes from the company’s headquarters, that would ultimately take on the work that had started in -Cambridge—sequencing patients’ tumors, generating the right mRNA codes for their vaccines, and then making those vaccines, all under one roof. The Norwood facility would eventually be the hub for making many of Moderna’s products, while manufacturing for intismeran shifted to a new facility in Marlborough, Mass., in 2025
Figuring out how to find the red flags on tumors (the markers distinguishing cancer cells from normal ones), and which ones to target with mRNA to get the best response, was critical. “I figured that we needed to code in a very deterministic fashion because we needed a robust process that was replicable,” Zaks says. He asked his sequencing team the maximum length of mRNA messages they could make, and Zaks added his own knowledge of how long mRNA sequences for tumor markers needed to be; “the rest is simple math,” he says. The ultimate number of those tumor red flags that Zaks and his team settled on was 34—the number included in intismeran. “It was no magic number that we calculated somehow with complicated math,” he says. “It was extremely simple—what length of mRNA did we need to make it reliable, and how long did we need to make each one to cover what tumors expressed? To date, in 2026, this is the only strategy [in cancer vaccines] known to work.”
Bancel saw an opportunity to put the power of mRNA to the test and decided to pivot nearly all of the small company’s resources to developing and manufacturing a vaccine against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. He had reason to be confident. By 2020, Moderna had already conducted eight clinical trials involving mRNA shots against various viruses, from influenza to cytomegalovirus (a common and chronic herpes virus) and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). In early human studies, all eight vaccines had generated good antibodies against the viruses in question. But, says Hoge, it wasn’t immediately obvious that the pandemic would become a long-term public-health threat, and he and Bancel debated Bancel’s decision to almost completely divert the small company’s resources to the pandemic effort. “‘Do you want me to stop treating people with cancer? Do I turn away a melanoma patient?’” Hoge remembers saying. “In the end, both of us ended up being right or wrong, depending on your perspective.”
Quality Control personnel prepare glass vials containing samples for in-process testing at the new manufacturing site for intismeran, a personalized mRNA-based cancer vaccine, at Moderna in Marlborough, Mass. on Oct. 19, 2026. —Tony Luong for TIMEHoge says that “COVID, without a doubt, catapulted us forward,” referring both to the tremendous real-time knowledge the team gained while developing the first mRNA vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, as well as the worldwide validation of the safety and efficacy of the approach that might have otherwise taken a decade or more. It also put Moderna on the map.
Beth Ryzyk heard the promising results while watching the news. In 2024, after being diagnosed with Stage IIIC melanoma, Ryzyk had decided to join the study of intismeran at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK). Surgeons removed her tumor as well as the lymph nodes under her arms, and after genetic sequencing, she learned she had 80 tumor markers. In the study, Moderna and Merck focused on the markers they thought would trigger the strongest immune response and designed a personalized vaccine for each of the patients in the treatment group. “It’s pretty amazing that they can individualize it to me and teach my body what to fight,” she says. The treatment is straight-forward enough that she received the intismeran and Keytruda near her home at MSK’s location in Westchester, New York. She still doesn’t know if she received the vaccine or a placebo, since the study has not been published yet, but she gets scans four times a year. Two years later, “so far so good—nothing has popped up, and it’s the best I can ask for,” she says. “The hard thing about melanoma is that it can come back to any part of your body, and it’s always in the back of your mind. So if it prevents 42% [of recurrence], I’ll take that.”
Bancel anticipates filing for U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval soon, with a possible decision on intismeran in 2027, but he isn’t waiting to explore other cancers for which the vaccine might also show benefit. Moderna is currently conducting nine clinical trials involving intismeran in melanoma, kidney, gastric, lung, and pancreatic cancer, as well as an early-phase study testing it alone, without a checkpoint inhibitor, in Stage I lung cancer.
Future refinements will include exploring whether the personalized approach of designing vaccines for each patient is truly scalable and affordable. One of the advantages of mRNA is that it doesn’t require growing cells but relies instead on computing power to analyze and generate the right mRNA sequences to target each patient’s cancer. “No cell cultures need to be grown,” says Berman. Traditionally, bespoke approaches have not been practical as treatments, because of the time and cost required to custom-design therapies. But Berman “absolutely” believes an mRNA platform can uniquely address both the time and potential cost of customized treatments. “We have scaled down the technical footprint and have plans to scale up [the program] to look at different tumors,” he says.
Quality Control personnel prepare glass vials containing samples for in-process testing at the new manufacturing site for intismeran, a personalized mRNA-based cancer vaccine, at Moderna in Marlborough, Mass. on Oct. 19, 2026. —Tony Luong for TIMEThen came the second Trump Administration. During President Trump’s first term, mRNA was given equal footing with more traditional vaccine-making approaches because of the urgency of the pandemic, but in Trump’s second term, mRNA became technology non grata. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), is a longtime skeptic of vaccines, including ones involving mRNA. In 2025, scientists reported being confidentially advised by staff at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which reports to HHS, to avoid using “mRNA” in research-grant proposals if they wanted to be successful in securing funding. Conspiracy theories about permanent genetic manipulation resulting from Moderna’s and Pfizer-BioNTech’s mRNA vaccines—not based on any scientific evidence—flooded the internet, and more people distrusted the technology.
Bancel eventually secured funding from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, the group that funded part of Moderna’s early COVID-vaccine development, after pledging 20% of production of a future approved vaccine to low- and middle-income countries, and began Phase III testing of its bird-flu vaccine in October 2026.
But the drop in revenues from waning interest in the COVID shot and the canceled government contract were a brutal blow to Moderna’s financial health, and Bancel was forced to lay off 10% of his workforce and shut down or delay some projects. “Business-wise it was easy, because you do the math, but emotionally it was really hard to separate with people who helped us build the company,” says Bancel. He also made difficult decisions to terminate some projects, including one for developing a vaccine against cytomegalovirus, which had been the company’s leading candidate before COVID.
The conflicting results are not unusual with a new technology, and Bancel is even more convinced than he was in 2011, back in Afeyan’s office, that mRNA is the technology of the future and will generate hundreds of new treatments for a range of diseases. By the end of the year, he expects to announce late-stage results from the first mRNA treatment for a rare disease in which people are missing a key protein that processes other proteins and fats.
“I always think about the long cycle,” says Bancel. “I knew that if you can figure out the engineering puzzle of building a business with mRNA, then the impact of this technology on humanity—way after I’m CEO, way after I’m dead—is going to be gigantic. And we are just beginning. We are just getting started.”
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