Moderna has become the first company to release a potential coronavirus vaccine, with the Boston-based biotech start-up announcing on Monday that it had sent the vials to the US National Institutes of Health to be tested in humans.
Shares in Moderna soared 15.6 per cent to $21.33 in after hours trading in New York as the drugmaker said that its new way of making vaccines helped it rapidly create the candidate known as mRNA-1273, cutting the time it takes to develop a new potential vaccine to try to curb the impact of the coronavirus outbreak.
Juan Andres, chief technical operations and quality officer at Moderna, said it was an “extraordinary effort” responding to the global health emergency with a “record speed” of 42 days from when the virus’ genome was sequenced.