‘Why did you guys sell everything?’ Inside the life-and-death struggle to fund Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine.

Moderna Inc. MRNA, +20.57% was launched in 2010 by Noubar Afeyan, a Lebanese-born bioengineer running a biotech-venture firm called Flagship Pioneering. He recruited Stéphane Bancel, a Harvard Business School graduate and native of Marseilles, as Moderna’s CEO. Almost immediately, Bancel felt self-imposed pressure to raise enough money so his company could develop drugs and vaccines based on messenger RNA molecules before rivals caught up.

Safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines are modern science’s greatest achievement. Developed in less than a year, these shots have saved hundreds of thousands of lives and averted more than 1.25 million hospitalizations. The shots, based on revolutionary, new technologies, also represent modern finance’s most important accomplishment. Companies including BioNTech SE BNTX, +14.

In 2018, Moderna unveiled a new factory, one that came at an enormous expense for a company nowhere near recording any profits. Research and other costs were also surging. Bancel was still finding enough investors willing to write enormous checks to cover their costs. In February 2018, he helped raise $500 million from Geneva-based Pictet Group, the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi, and New York hedge fund Viking Global Investors, among others.

On January 12, Bancel flew to San Francisco to attend JPMorgan Chase’s annual health-care conference, hoping to impress attendees with a speech about Moderna’s progress on its shots to protect against cytomegalovirus, a common virus affecting babies. During his speech and his conversations with investors and others, Bancel didn’t mention the new pathogen circulating in China. It didn’t seem relevant to anyone in the room.

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