Matej Mikulic
Research expert covering health, pharma & medtech
Moderna - Statistics & Facts
Moderna was among the biotech and pharmaceutical companies which received a lot of attention during the COVID-19 pandemic. Mostly unknown to the broader public before the pandemic, the early development of a vaccine against the new coronavirus soon made it omnipresent in the global news. In the race for the first evidentially safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine, Moderna’s name was top on the list, alongside BioNTech (together with Pfizer) and AstraZeneca (together with Oxford University). In the end, the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine was the first COVID-19 vaccine which was approved by a stringent regulatory authority for emergency, and later for regular use. Moderna with its vaccine mRNA-1273, however, followed only a few days later.
The pandemic as turning point
The company was founded in 2010 under the name ModeRNA Therapeutics. The name is a derivate from ’modified’ and ‘RNA’, showing the company’s supposed focus on work with modified ribonucleic acids, which saw a breakthrough in the second half of the 2000s. With its initial public offering in 2018, the company rebranded itself under the new name Moderna Inc. Moderna is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one of the leading life science hubs in the U.S. and worldwide. The COVID-19 vaccine mRNA-1273 – later brand-named as Spikevax – was the company’s first product approved by the Federal Drug Administration. Its massive use especially in Western countries brought the company sky-rocketing revenues and made it highly profitable for the first time. Spikevax was the world’s second best-selling pharmaceutical product in 2022, generating over 21 billion U.S. dollars in revenues. After the official end of the pandemic and a decreasing demand for COVID-19 vaccines, however, Moderna's revenues in 2023 reached only around a third of the previous year's amount.Massive growth and some criticism
Moderna saw an extreme revenue development during the last years. In 2019, the company reported only 60 million U.S. dollars in revenue. Over financial year 2020, the first positive effects of the development, and then approval at year-end, of the COVID-19 vaccine were already tangible, resulting in 800 million U.S. dollars of revenue. With the full roll-out of the vaccination campaign all over the world, Moderna’s revenue increased more than twentyfold to 18.5 billion dollars in 2021. This was, indeed, totally due to sales of Spikevax. However, with success and profitability during the pandemic, there came also criticism. For instance, Moderna set a very high price tag for its COVID-19 vaccine, although the largest part of its R&D spending on mRNA-1273 was funded by taxpayer money. Similar to the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine, the high price made Moderna's vaccine mostly unavailable for lower-income countries, thus contributing to the large inequality gap during the global COVID-19 vaccination campaign.
