In January, Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel was reading the news on his tablet while on vacation in the south of France. A headline gave him pause: "Chinese authorities working to solve mystery virus outbreak." It was published by The Wall Street Journal on January 6. The 48-year-old Frenchman wrote an email to Dr. Barney Graham, a vaccine researcher at the American Institutes of Health (NIH), asking him what he knew about these cases of pneumonia that were emerging in the interior of China. . Graham responded that he did not yet know what virus it was, but within days it was identified as a coronavirus . Bancel asked Graham to let him know when scientists discovered the genetic sequence of the virus.
His company, Moderna, was ready to get to work. Now, less than a year later, Moderna and the American Institutes of Health have developed a vaccine that appears to be highly effective in preventing COVID-19 , the disease caused by this virus. The speed with which Moderna and another program, led by Pfizer and BioNTech, have worked to develop a Europe Cell Phone Number List vaccine against this new virus is unprecedented. If both vaccines win emergency authorization before the end of the year, about 20 million Americans could be immunized by December , according to US government scientists. This urgent approval could mark the beginning of the end of this coronavirus in the world. A new era in vaccine research Beyond the pandemic, Moderna is now among a handful of companies looking to usher in a new era in vaccine research, built around technologies that are much faster than traditional methods.
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The new approach promises a revolution in the way vaccines will be manufactured and, for Moderna, an opportunity to have a greater share in a market valued at billion dollars (24.9 billion euros) and dominated by large pharmaceutical companies. "It's not the same game," Bancel said in previous statements to Business Insider . "We have never seen the virus. We don't need to. What we do need is its genetic sequence." For now, the pandemic continues. The world is seeing how infections, hospitalizations and deaths increase and experts fear that the situation will worsen in winter. 200 days without coronavirus infections: this is how Taiwan has managed to stop the pandemic Vaccine supplies will be very limited in the coming months, even though production is scaling up.
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