[It is a story that began three decades ago, with a little-known
scientist who refused to quit.] [[link removed]]

THE STORY OF MRNA: HOW A ONCE-DISMISSED IDEA BECAME A LEADING
TECHNOLOGY IN THE COVID VACCINE RACE  
[[link removed]]


 

Damian Garde (STAT), Jonathan Saltzman (Boston Globe)
November 10, 2020
Boston Globe, STAT
[[link removed]]


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[[link removed]]
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[[link removed]]
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* [[link removed]]

_ It is a story that began three decades ago, with a little-known
scientist who refused to quit. _

Part of a "freezer farm," a football field-sized facility for storing
finished Covid-19 vaccines, under construction in Kalamazoo, Mich.
Pfizer’s experimental vaccine requires ultracold storage, at about
-70 C, Jeremy Davidson / Pfizer via AP

 

ANDOVER, Mass. — The liquid that many hope could help end the
Covid-19 pandemic is stored in a nondescript metal tank in a
manufacturing complex owned by Pfizer, one of the world’s biggest
drug companies. There is nothing remarkable about the container, which
could fit in a walk-in closet, except that its contents could end up
in the world’s first authorized Covid-19 vaccine.

Pfizer, a 171-year-old Fortune 500 powerhouse, has made a
billion-dollar bet on that dream. So has a brash, young rival just 23
miles away in Cambridge, Mass. Moderna, a 10-year-old biotech company
with billions in market valuation but no approved products, is racing
forward with a vaccine of its own. Its new sprawling drug-making
facility nearby is hiring workers at a fast clip in the hopes of
making history — and a lot of money.

In many ways, the companies and their leaders couldn’t be more
different. Pfizer, working with a little-known German biotech called
BioNTech, has taken pains for much of the year to manage expectations.
Moderna has made nearly as much news for its stream of upbeat press
releases, executives’ stock sales
[[link removed]],
and spectacular rounds of funding as for its science.

Each is well-aware of the other in the race to be first.

But what the companies share may be bigger than their differences:
Both are banking on a genetic technology that has long held huge
promise but has so far run into biological roadblocks. It is
called synthetic messenger RNA
[[link removed]],
an ingenious variation on the natural substance that directs protein
production in cells throughout the body. Its prospects have swung
billions of dollars on the stock market, made and imperiled scientific
careers, and fueled hopes that it could be a breakthrough that allows
society to return to normalcy after months living in fear.

Both companies have been frequently name-checked by President Trump.
Pfizer reported strong, but preliminary, data
[[link removed]] on
Monday, and Moderna is expected to follow suit soon with a glimpse of
its data. Both firms hope these preliminary results will allow an
emergency deployment of their vaccines — millions of doses likely
targeted to frontline medical workers and others most at risk of
Covid-19.

Related: Four reasons for encouragement based on Pfizer’s Covid-19
vaccine results
[[link removed]]

There are about a dozen experimental vaccines
[[link removed]] in
late-stage clinical trials globally, but the ones being tested by
Pfizer and Moderna are the only two that rely on messenger RNA.

For decades, scientists have dreamed about the seemingly endless
possibilities of custom-made messenger RNA, or mRNA.

Researchers understood its role as a recipe book for the body’s
trillions of cells, but their efforts to expand the menu have come in
fits and starts. The concept: By making precise tweaks to synthetic
mRNA and injecting people with it, any cell in the body could be
transformed into an on-demand drug factory.

But turning scientific promise into medical reality has been more
difficult than many assumed. Although relatively easy and quick to
produce compared to traditional vaccine-making, no mRNA vaccine or
drug has ever won approval.

Even now, as Moderna and Pfizer test their vaccines on roughly 74,000
volunteers in pivotal vaccine studies, many experts question whether
the technology is ready for prime time.

“I worry about innovation at the expense of practicality,” Peter
Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor
College of Medicine and an authority on vaccines, said recently. The
U.S. government’s Operation Warp Speed program
[[link removed]],
which has underwritten the development of Moderna’s vaccine and
pledged to buy Pfizer’s vaccine if it works, is “weighted toward
technology platforms that have never made it to licensure before.”

Whether mRNA vaccines succeed or not, their path from a gleam in a
scientist’s eye to the brink of government approval has been a tale
of personal perseverance, eureka moments in the lab, soaring
expectations — and an unprecedented flow of cash into the biotech
industry.

It is a story that began three decades ago, with a little-known
scientist who refused to quit.

Before messenger RNA was a multibillion-dollar idea, it was a
scientific backwater. And for the Hungarian-born scientist behind a
key mRNA discovery, it was a career dead-end.

Katalin Karikó spent the 1990s collecting rejections. Her work,
attempting to harness the power of mRNA to fight disease, was too
far-fetched for government grants, corporate funding, and even support
from her own colleagues.

It all made sense on paper. In the natural world, the body relies on
millions of tiny proteins to keep itself alive and healthy, and it
uses mRNA to tell cells which proteins to make. If you could design
your own mRNA, you could, in theory, hijack that process and create
any protein you might desire — antibodies to vaccinate against
infection, enzymes to reverse a rare disease, or growth agents to mend
damaged heart tissue.

In 1990, researchers at the University of Wisconsin managed to make
it work in mice [[link removed]]. Karikó
wanted to go further.

The problem, she knew, was that synthetic RNA was notoriously
vulnerable to the body’s natural defenses, meaning it would likely
be destroyed before reaching its target cells. And, worse, the
resulting biological havoc might stir up an immune response that could
make the therapy a health risk for some patients.

Related: Selling stock like clockwork, Moderna’s top doctor gets $1
million richer every week
[[link removed]]

It was a real obstacle, and still may be, but Karikó was convinced it
was one she could work around. Few shared her confidence.

“Every night I was working: grant, grant, grant,” Karikó
remembered, referring to her efforts to obtain funding. “And it came
back always no, no, no.”

By 1995, after six years on the faculty at the University of
Pennsylvania, Karikó got demoted. She had been on the path to full
professorship, but with no money coming in to support her work on
mRNA, her bosses saw no point in pressing on.

She was back to the lower rungs of the scientific academy.

“Usually, at that point, people just say goodbye and leave because
it’s so horrible,” Karikó said.

There’s no opportune time for demotion, but 1995 had already been
uncommonly difficult. Karikó had recently endured a cancer scare, and
her husband was stuck in Hungary sorting out a visa issue. Now the
work to which she’d devoted countless hours was slipping through her
fingers.

“I thought of going somewhere else, or doing something else,”
Karikó said. “I also thought maybe I’m not good enough, not smart
enough. I tried to imagine: Everything is here, and I just have to do
better experiments.”

Katalin Karikó, a senior vice president at BioNTech overseeing its
mRNA work, in her home office in Rydal, Penn. Jessica Kourkounis for
the Boston Globe

In time, those better experiments came together. After a decade of
trial and error, Karikó and her longtime collaborator at Penn —
Drew Weissman, an immunologist with a medical degree and Ph.D. from
Boston University — discovered a remedy for mRNA’s Achilles’
heel.

The stumbling block, as Karikó’s many grant rejections pointed out,
was that injecting synthetic mRNA typically led to that vexing immune
response; the body sensed a chemical intruder, and went to war. The
solution, Karikó and Weissman discovered, was the biological
equivalent of swapping out a tire.

Every strand of mRNA is made up of four molecular building blocks
called nucleosides. But in its altered, synthetic form, one of those
building blocks, like a misaligned wheel on a car, was throwing
everything off by signaling the immune system. So Karikó and Weissman
simply subbed it out for a slightly tweaked version, creating a hybrid
mRNA that could sneak its way into cells without alerting the body’s
defenses.

“That was a key discovery,” said Norbert Pardi, an assistant
professor of medicine at Penn and frequent collaborator. “Karikó
and Weissman figured out that if you incorporate modified nucleosides
into mRNA, you can kill two birds with one stone.”

That discovery, described in a series of scientific papers starting in
2005, largely flew under the radar at first, said Weissman, but it
offered absolution to the mRNA researchers who had kept the faith
during the technology’s lean years. And it was the starter pistol
for the vaccine sprint to come.

Related: The Road Ahead: Charting the coronavirus pandemic over the
next 12 months — and beyond
[[link removed]]

And even though the studies by Karikó and Weissman went unnoticed by
some, they caught the attention of two key scientists — one in the
United States, another abroad — who would later help found Moderna
and Pfizer’s future partner, BioNTech.

Derrick Rossi, a native of Toronto who rooted for the Maple Leafs and
sported a soul patch, was a 39-year-old postdoctoral fellow in stem
cell biology at Stanford University in 2005 when he read the first
paper. Not only did he recognize it as groundbreaking, he now says
Karikó and Weissman deserve the Nobel Prize in chemistry.

“If anyone asks me whom to vote for some day down the line, I would
put them front and center,” he said. “That fundamental discovery
is going to go into medicines that help the world.”

Derrick Rossi, one of the founders of Moderna, in his Newton, Mass.,
home. He ended his affiliation with the company in 2014. Suzanne
Kreiter/the Boston Globe

But Rossi didn’t have vaccines on his mind when he set out to build
on their findings in 2007 as a new assistant professor at Harvard
Medical School running his own lab.

He wondered whether modified messenger RNA might hold the key to
obtaining something else researchers desperately wanted: a new source
of embryonic stem cells.

In a feat of biological alchemy, embryonic stem cells can turn into
any type of cell in the body. That gives them the potential to treat a
dizzying array of conditions, from Parkinson’s disease to spinal
cord injuries.

But using those cells for research had created an ethical firestorm
because they are harvested from discarded embryos.

Rossi thought he might be able to sidestep the controversy. He would
use modified messenger molecules to reprogram adult cells so that they
acted like embryonic stem cells.

He asked a postdoctoral fellow in his lab to explore the idea. In
2009, after more than a year of work, the postdoc waved Rossi over to
a microscope. Rossi peered through the lens and saw something
extraordinary: a plate full of the very cells he had hoped to create.

Rossi excitedly informed his colleague Timothy Springer, another
professor at Harvard Medical School and a biotech entrepreneur.
Recognizing the commercial potential, Springer contacted Robert
Langer, the prolific inventor and biomedical engineering professor at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

On a May afternoon in 2010, Rossi and Springer visited Langer at his
laboratory in Cambridge. What happened at the two-hour meeting and in
the days that followed has become the stuff of legend — and an
ego-bruising squabble.

Langer is a towering figure in biotechnology and an expert on
drug-delivery technology. At least 400 drug and medical device
companies have licensed his patents. His office walls display many of
his 250 major awards, including the Charles Stark Draper Prize,
considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for engineers.

As he listened to Rossi describe his use of modified mRNA, Langer
recalled, he realized the young professor had discovered something far
bigger than a novel way to create stem cells. Cloaking mRNA so it
could slip into cells to produce proteins had a staggering number of
applications, Langer thought, and might even save millions of lives.

“I think you can do a lot better than that,” Langer recalled
telling Rossi, referring to stem cells. “I think you could make new
drugs, new vaccines — everything.”

Langer could barely contain his excitement when he got home to his
wife.

“This could be the most successful company in history,” he
remembered telling her, even though no company existed yet.

Three days later Rossi made another presentation, to the leaders of
Flagship Ventures. Founded and run by Noubar Afeyan, a swaggering
entrepreneur, the Cambridge venture capital firm has created dozens of
biotech startups. Afeyan had the same enthusiastic reaction as Langer,
saying in a 2015 article in Nature that Rossi’s innovation “was
intriguing instantaneously.”

Within several months, Rossi, Langer, Afeyan, and another
physician-researcher at Harvard formed the firm Moderna — a new word
combining modified and RNA.

Springer was the first investor to pledge money, Rossi said. In a 2012
Moderna news release, Afeyan said the firm’s “promise rivals that
of the earliest biotechnology companies over 30 years ago — adding
an entirely new drug category to the pharmaceutical arsenal.”

But although Moderna has made each of the founders hundreds of
millions of dollars — even before the company had produced a single
product — Rossi’s account is marked by bitterness. In interviews
with the Globe in October, he accused Langer and Afeyan of propagating
a condescending myth that he didn’t understand his discovery’s
full potential until they pointed it out to him.

“It’s total malarkey,” said Rossi, who ended his affiliation
with Moderna in 2014. “I’m embarrassed for them. Everybody in the
know actually just shakes their heads.”

Rossi said that the slide decks he used in his presentation to
Flagship noted that his discovery could lead to new medicines.
“That’s the thing Noubar has used to turn Flagship into a big
company, and he says it was totally his idea,” Rossi said.

Afeyan, the chair of Moderna, recently credited Rossi with advancing
the work of the Penn scientists. But, he said, that only spurred
Afeyan and Langer “to ask the question, ‘Could you think of a code
molecule that helps you make anything you want within the body?’”

Langer, for his part, told STAT and the Globe that Rossi “made an
important finding” but had focused almost entirely “on the stem
cell thing.”

Robert Langer, the prolific inventor and MIT biomedical engineering
professor, is a Moderna co-founder. Pat Greenhouse/the Boston Globe

Despite the squabbling that followed the birth of Moderna, other
scientists also saw messenger RNA as potentially revolutionary.

In Mainz, Germany, situated on the left bank of the Rhine, another new
company was being formed by a married team of researchers who would
also see the vast potential for the technology, though vaccines for
infectious diseases weren’t on top of their list then.

A native of Turkey, Ugur Sahin moved to Germany after his father got a
job at a Ford factory in Cologne. His wife, Özlem Türeci had, as a
child, followed her father, a surgeon, on his rounds at a Catholic
hospital. She and Sahin are physicians who met in 1990 working at a
hospital in Saarland.

The couple have long been interested in immunotherapy, which harnesses
the immune system to fight cancer and has become one of the most
exciting innovations in medicine in recent decades. In particular,
they were tantalized by the possibility of creating personalized
vaccines that teach the immune system to eliminate cancer cells.

Both see themselves as scientists first and foremost. But they are
also formidable entrepreneurs. After they co-founded another biotech,
the couple persuaded twin brothers who had invested in that firm,
Thomas and Andreas Strungmann, to spin out a new company that would
develop cancer vaccines that relied on mRNA.

That became BioNTech, another blended name, derived from
Biopharmaceutical New Technologies. Its U.S. headquarters is in
Cambridge. Sahin is the CEO, Türeci the chief medical officer.

“We are one of the leaders in messenger RNA, but we don’t consider
ourselves a messenger RNA company,” said Sahin, also a professor at
the Mainz University Medical Center. “We consider ourselves an
immunotherapy company.”

Related: Covid-19 Drugs and Vaccines Tracker
[[link removed]]

Like Moderna, BioNTech licensed technology developed by the
Pennsylvania scientist whose work was long ignored, Karikó, and her
collaborator, Weissman. In fact, in 2013, the company hired Karikó as
senior vice president to help oversee its mRNA work.

But in their early years, the two biotechs operated in very different
ways.

In 2011, Moderna hired the CEO who would personify its brash approach
to the business of biotech.

Stéphane Bancel was a rising star in the life sciences, a chemical
engineer with a Harvard MBA who was known as a businessman, not a
scientist. At just 34, he became CEO of the French diagnostics firm
BioMérieux in 2007 but was wooed away to Moderna four years later by
Afeyan.

Moderna made a splash in 2012 with the announcement that it had raised
$40 million from venture capitalists despite being years away from
testing its science in humans. Four months later, the British
pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca agreed to pay Moderna a staggering
$240 million for the rights to dozens of mRNA drugs that did not yet
exist.

Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel at the company’s offices in Cambridge,
Mass. Aram Boghosian for STAT

The biotech had no scientific publications to its name and hadn’t
shared a shred of data publicly. Yet it somehow convinced investors
and multinational drug makers that its scientific findings and
expertise were destined to change the world. Under Bancel’s
leadership, Moderna would raise more than $1 billion in investments
and partnership funds over the next five years.

Moderna’s promise — and the more than $2 billion it raised
before going public in 2018
[[link removed]] —
hinged on creating a fleet of mRNA medicines that could be safely
dosed over and over. But behind the scenes the company’s scientists
were running into a familiar problem. In animal studies, the ideal
dose of their leading mRNA therapy was triggering dangerous immune
reactions — the kind for which Karikó had improvised a major
workaround under some conditions — but a lower dose had proved too
weak to show any benefits.

Moderna had to pivot. If repeated doses of mRNA were too toxic to test
in human beings, the company would have to rely on something that
takes only one or two injections to show an effect. Gradually,
biotech’s self-proclaimed disruptor became a vaccines company,
putting its experimental drugs on the back burner and talking up the
potential of a field long considered a loss-leader by the drug
industry.

Related: In the race for a Covid-19 vaccine, Pfizer turns to a
scientist with a history of defying skeptics — and getting results
[[link removed]]

Meanwhile BioNTech has often acted like the anti-Moderna, garnering
far less attention.

In part, that was by design, said Sahin. For the first five years, the
firm operated in what Sahin called “submarine mode,” issuing no
news releases, and focusing on scientific research, much of it
originating in his university lab. Unlike Moderna, the firm has
published its research from the start, including about 150 scientific
papers in just the past eight years.

In 2013, the firm began disclosing its ambitions to transform the
treatment of cancer and soon announced a series of eight partnerships
with major drug makers. BioNTech has 13 compounds in clinical trials
for a variety of illnesses but, like Moderna, has yet to get a product
approved.

When BioNTech went public last October, it raised $150 million, and
closed with a market value of $3.4 billion — less than half of
Moderna’s when it went public in 2018.

Despite his role as CEO, Sahin has largely maintained the air of an
academic. He still uses his university email address and rides a
20-year-old mountain bicycle from his home to the office because he
doesn’t have a driver’s license.

Then, late last year, the world changed.

Moderna’s facility in Norwood, Mass. Alex Hogan / STAT

Shortly before midnight, on Dec. 30, the International Society for
Infectious Diseases, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit, posted an
alarming report online. A number of people in Wuhan, a city of more
than 11 million people in central China, had been diagnosed with
“unexplained pneumonia.”

Chinese researchers soon identified 41 hospitalized patients with the
disease. Most had visited the Wuhan South China Seafood Market.
Vendors sold live wild animals, from bamboo rats to ostriches, in
crowded stalls. That raised concerns that the virus might have leaped
from an animal, possibly a bat, to humans.

After isolating the virus from patients, Chinese scientists on Jan. 10
posted online its genetic sequence. Because companies that work with
messenger RNA don’t need the virus itself to create a vaccine, just
a computer that tells scientists what chemicals to put together and in
what order, researchers at Moderna, BioNTech, and other companies got
to work.

A pandemic loomed. The companies’ focus on vaccines could not have
been more fortuitous.

Moderna and BioNTech each designed a tiny snip of genetic code that
could be deployed into cells to stimulate a coronavirus immune
response. The two vaccines differ in their chemical structures, how
the substances are made, and how they deliver mRNA into cells. Both
vaccines require two shots a few weeks apart.

The biotechs were competing against dozens of other groups that
employed varying vaccine-making approaches, including the traditional,
more time-consuming method of using an inactivated virus to produce an
immune response.

Moderna was especially well-positioned for this moment.

Forty-two days after the genetic code was released, Moderna’s CEO
Bancel opened an email on Feb. 24 on his cellphone and smiled, as he
recalled to the Globe. Up popped a photograph of a box placed inside a
refrigerated truck at the Norwood plant and bound for the National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Md. The
package held a few hundred vials, each containing the experimental
vaccine.

Moderna was the first drug maker to deliver a potential vaccine for
clinical trials. Soon, its vaccine became the first to undergo testing
on humans, in a small early-stage trial. And on July 28, it became the
first to start getting tested in a late-stage trial in a scene that
reflected the firm’s receptiveness to press coverage.

The first volunteer to get a shot in Moderna’s late-stage trial was
a television anchor at the CNN affiliate in Savannah, Ga., a move that
raised eyebrows at rival vaccine makers.

Along with those achievements, Moderna has repeatedly stirred
controversy.

On May 18, Moderna issued a press release trumpeting “positive
interim clinical data.” The firm said its vaccine had generated
neutralizing antibodies in the first eight volunteers in the
early-phase study, a tiny sample.

But Moderna didn’t provide any backup data
[[link removed]],
making it hard to assess how encouraging the results were.
Nonetheless, Moderna’s share price rose 20% that day.

Some top Moderna executives also drew criticism for selling shares
worth millions
[[link removed]],
including Bancel and the firm’s chief medical officer, Tal Zaks
[[link removed]].

In addition, some critics have said the government has given Moderna a
sweetheart deal by bankrolling the costs for developing the vaccine
and pledging to buy at least 100 million doses, all for $2.48 billion.

That works out to roughly $25 a dose, which Moderna acknowledges
includes a profit.

In contrast, the government has pledged more than $1 billion to
Johnson & Johnson to manufacture and provide at least 100 million
doses of its vaccine, which uses different technology than mRNA. But
J&J, which collaborated with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s
Center for Virology and Vaccine Research and is also in a late-stage
trial, has promised not to profit off sales of the vaccine during the
pandemic.

Over in Germany, Sahin, the head of BioNTech, said a Lancet article in
January about the outbreak in Wuhan, an international hub, galvanized
him.

“We understood that this would become a pandemic,” he said.

The next day, he met with his leadership team.

“I told them that we have to deal with a pandemic which is coming to
Germany,” Sahin recalled.

He also realized he needed a strong partner to manufacture the vaccine
and thought of Pfizer. The two companies had worked together before to
try to develop mRNA influenza vaccines. In March, he called Pfizer’s
top vaccine expert, Kathrin Jansen
[[link removed]].

“I asked her if Pfizer was interested in teaming up with us, and
she, without any discussion, said, ‘Yes, we would love to do
that,’” Sahin recalled.

Philip Dormitzer, chief scientific officer for viral vaccines at
Pfizer, said developing a coronavirus vaccine is “very much in
Pfizer’s comfort zone as a vaccine company with multiple vaccine
products.”

Pfizer has about 2,400 employees in Massachusetts, including about
1,400 at its Andover plant, one of three making the vaccine for the
New York-based company in the U.S.

Pfizer, through its partnership with BioNTech, isn’t taking any
money upfront from the government. Rather, the federal government will
pay the partners $1.95 billion for at least 100 million doses if the
vaccine gets approved.

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, who rose through the ranks after more than
25 years with the company, said in a September interview with “Face
the Nation” that if the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine fails, his company
will absorb the financial loss. He said Pfizer opted not to take
government funding up front to shield the drug giant from politics.

“I wanted to liberate our scientists from any bureaucracy,” he
said. “When you get money from someone, that always comes with
strings.”

Top executives at Pfizer also have sold far less stock compared to
Moderna since the pandemic began.

BioNTech executives haven’t sold any shares since the company went
public last year, according to Securities and Exchange Commission
records. Still, the soaring share prices of BioNTech and Moderna have
made both Sahin and Bancel billionaires, according to Forbes.

Some experts worry about injecting the first vaccine of this kind into
hundreds of million of people so quickly.

“You have all these odd clinical and pathological changes caused by
this novel bat coronavirus, and you’re about to meet it with all of
these vaccines with which you have no experience,” said Paul Offit,
an infectious disease expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
and an authority on vaccines.

Blood samples from volunteers participating in Moderna’s Phase 3
Covid-19 vaccine trial wait to be processed in a lab  at the
University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. Taimy Alvarez / AP

Several other drug makers have also developed experimental mRNA
vaccines for the coronavirus, but are not as far along, including
CureVac, another German biotech, and Translate Bio, which has
partnered with the French vaccine giant Sanofi Pasteur.

Pfizer began its late-stage trial on July 27 — the same day as
Moderna — with the first volunteers receiving injections at the
University of Rochester. It announced its promising early results
[[link removed]] from
that trial on Monday, and hopes to have sufficient data this month to
seek emergency use authorization of the vaccine for at least some
high-risk people.

Moderna may not be far behind. Its spokesperson Ray Jordan said Monday
that executives suspected Pfizer would release some preliminary
late-stage trial data before Moderna, in part because of the dosing
schedule of the rival vaccines. Recipients of Pfizer’s vaccine get
two doses three weeks apart, while recipients of Moderna’s get two
doses four weeks apart.

Striking a magnanimous note, he described Pfizer’s news as “an
important step for mRNA medicine.”

“We’ve said that the world needs more than one Covid-19
vaccine,” Jordan said. “We remain on track.”

_Mark Arsenault of the Globe staff contributed reporting._

_DAMIAN GARDE covers biotech from New York for STAT. He spent four
years covering drug development at FierceBiotech, and previously wrote
for Patch.com and the Albuquerque Journal. Damian spends his free time
watching movies and shouting at the New York Knicks through screens of
various sizes._

_JONATHAN SALTZMAN has worked at the Boston Globe since 2002 and
currently covers biotechnology and the life sciences. He previously
covered the federal and state courts and then spent six years on the
Spotlight Team. He was part of a team that won a George Polk Award in
2012 for a series on the state’s unusually high rate of acquittal at
bench trials for drunk driving. He was also a runner-up for other
awards, including a Pulitzer Prize and Goldsmith Prize for
Investigative Reporting, for a series of stories about dangerous
off-campus housing for college students in Boston. Saltzman, a
graduate of Brooklyn College, has worked at the Providence Journal,
USA Today, the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, and the Poughkeepsie
Journal. He also co-hosted a daily magazine show for the NPR station
in Rhode Island. He lives in Providence._

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