High hopes Dr. Şahin wasn’t the only vaccine researcher sparking skepticism in late 2019. In Cambridge, Mass., Stéphane Bancel, who ran a company called Moderna Inc., faced even more serious doubts about his quest to develop safe and effective vaccines and drugs using mRNA molecules.
By then, researchers had spent decades working with mRNA but most experts thought the idea folly. The molecule instructs our cells to create necessary proteins but is so unstable that it is quickly chopped up by the body’s enzymes.
Injecting the molecule and hoping it could make it all the way to the cell to create proteins, as Moderna and BioNTech were trying to do, seemed a nearly impossible task.