Vaccine is made by AI

https://sloanreview.mit.edu/audio/ai-and-the-covid-19-vaccine-modernas-dave-johnson/

In this bonus episode of the Me, Myself, and AI podcast, our hosts learn how Moderna used artificial intelligence to speed up development of the vaccine and how the technology has helped to automate other key systems and processes to build efficiencies across the organization. Dave also describes Moderna’s digital-first culture and offers insights around collaboration that can be applied across industries.

Dave Johnson: That’s a great point. The whole COVID vaccine development, we’re immensely proud of the work that we’ve done there, and we’re immensely proud of the superhuman effort that our people went through to bring it to market so quickly. But a lot of it was built on just what you said: this infrastructure that we had put in place where we didn’t build algorithms specifically for COVID; we just put them through the same pipeline of activity that we’ve been doing. We just turned it as fast as we could. When we think about everything we do at Moderna, we think about this platform capability. We were never going to make one drug; that was never the plan. The plan was always to make a whole platform around mRNA because, since it’s an information-based product, all you do is change the information encoded in the molecule, and you have a completely different drug. We knew that if you can get one in the market, you can get any number of them to the market. And so all the decisions we made around how we designed the company and how we designed the digital infrastructure was all around this platform notion that we’re not going to build this for one thing — we’re going to build a solution that services this whole platform. And so that’s exactly why we built this early preclinical staff where we can just crank through quite a few of these. That’s why we built these algorithms to automate activities. Anytime we see something where we know that scale and making it parallel is going to improve things, we put in place this process.

We tend not to be a company of half measures, so when we decide we’re going to do something, we’re going to do it. It’s been a very strong message from our senior leadership, about “This is the future of the company — injecting digital and AI into everything we do. Under no uncertain terms, this is happening.” To the point that, as we think about the fact that we’re growing really fast as a company — we just doubled; we’re probably going to double again — we’re bringing in a lot of new folks from outside the company, to grow, who are not necessarily familiar with this digital culture that we’ve had. And so, what we’re working on right now is actually developing what we’re calling an AI academy, which we intend to be a very thorough, in-depth training for our company, from people who would use and interact with AI models on a daily basis to senior leaders who would be responsible [for] a portfolio of potential projects in their areas. And that just shows the level of serious commitment we have about this. We were built on this concept of having a smaller company that’s very agile and can move fast. We see digital as a key enabler for that and AI as a key enabler for that. So the hope is that helps us to compete in ways that other companies can’t. And that is certainly the intention here.

Yeah, “We started post. We wanted to be agile, we wanted to be small, we wanted to do a lot more with everything that we had, and so that had to be platform-centric, data-centric, AI-centric, and that’s how we built [the company]. So AI is everywhere. Why are you surprised, Sam, that AI is everywhere? Of course, it’s everywhere. We do it for planning and the trials and sequencing and …” It’s quite energizing and intriguing how it’s just a very different mindset toward AI.