Moderna’s AI Could Accelerate Hantavirus Vaccine Development

Drug development has always been a slow business. A single medicine can take 10 to 15 years and cost billions before it reaches a patient. Moderna has fewer than 6,000 employees and plans to create a new product 15 times over in the next five years.

That bet rests almost entirely on artificial intelligence (AI). The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based biotech firm has deployed more than 750 internal AI models across scientific, regulatory and operational workflows since partnering with OpenAI in early 2023.

Hantavirus, a rare pathogen with fatality rates above 30% for some strains, is one of the diseases in its research roster. Bloomberg reported the company had been running early-stage hantavirus vaccine research with the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases and Korea University’s Vaccine Innovation Center before a cluster of cases emerged on a cruise ship in April.

Stéphane Bancel, Moderna’s CEO, has been direct about the scale of what the company is attempting.

“If we had to do it the old biopharmaceutical ways, we might need a hundred thousand people today,” Bancel said, according to an OpenAI post highlighting their partnership. “We really believe we can maximize our impact on patients with a few thousand people, using technology and AI to scale the company.”

750 Tools in 2 Months

The foundation of Moderna’s AI strategy is a company-wide rollout of ChatGPT Enterprise. The company started in early 2023 with mChat, an internal chatbot built on OpenAI’s application programming interface (API) that reached 80% employee adoption. When ChatGPT Enterprise launched, Moderna ran a structured comparison of mChat, Microsoft Copilot, and the new platform. ChatGPT Enterprise won by a wide margin.

Brice Challamel, head of AI products and platforms at Moderna, OpenAI noted, described what followed as something the company hadn’t anticipated. “We were never here to fill a bucket, but to light a fire,” Challamel said. Within two months of adoption, Moderna had 750 GPTs built across the company, 40% of active users had created their own tools, and each employee averaged 120 conversations per week on the platform.

Moderna’s change management program ran for roughly 20 months before the ChatGPT Enterprise rollout. It included a company-wide AI prompt contest, a cohort of 100 internal AI champions, and an internal forum that now draws 2,000 active participants each week.

From Dosing Decisions to the Legal Team

Inside the clinical operation, one of those 750 GPTs is doing work that once took weeks. Dose ID, a tool built on ChatGPT Enterprise’s data analysis features, helps the clinical study team verify optimal vaccine doses. It analyzes large trial datasets, applies standard dose selection criteria and generates charts of findings for human review before a candidate advances to late-stage trials.

Meklit Workneh, director of clinical development at Moderna, said the tool lets the team analyze data from multiple angles. The legal team reached 100% adoption of ChatGPT Enterprise. Shannon Klinger, Moderna’s chief legal officer, said AI lets lawyers focus time on work “that is truly driving an impact for patients.”

Other tools handle contract summaries, internal policy questions, quarterly earnings slide preparation, and investor communications like converting technical language into plain terms for external audiences.

Moderna’s pipeline target of 15 products in five years sits against an industry backdrop where that pace has rarely been attempted, let alone achieved.

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