3 ms·
Well that was money well spent!
by jonplackett 5y ago
Well that was money well spent!
- scotty79 5y agoI wonder what's the story behind BioNTech/Pfizer They created equivalent vaccine.
- mytailorisrich 5y agoI see that BioNTech was founded in 2008. Moderna was founded in 2010. I guess that like many advances, mRNA was (and still is) a new, promising technology that prompted people to found companies to bring it to the market. Moderna, as an American company, probably simply went to see DARPA when they were looking for funding because of the potential of the technology.
- jonplackett 5y agoBoth are based on the work of one scientist Katalin Karikó She had a pretty tough time getting her work accepted at the time - no one would fund it, she got demoted, everyone said it wouldn’t work etc - as is the way with all genuinely new ideas! This is a really good write up - her story starts about half way in. https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/10/the-story-of-mrna-how-a-once-dismissed-idea-became-a-leading-technology-in-the-covid-vaccine-race/ https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/10/the-story-of-mrna-how-a-...
- eliaspro 5y agoIt actually goes back even further to Ingmar Hoerr (who went on to found CureVac, producing now a temperature stable SARS-COV2 vaccine) who accidentally discovered that RNA can be stabilized using liposomes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingmar_Hoerr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingmar_Hoerr https://www.nzz.ch/wirtschaft/curevac-gruender-und-mrna-pionier-ingmar-hoerr-im-nzz-interview-ld.1602797 https://www.nzz.ch/wirtschaft/curevac-gruender-und-mrna-pion...