Moderna Tech Chief - "Hacking the software of life."

I'm here today to tell you that we're actually hacking the software of life and that it's changing the way we think about prevention and treatment of disease. So here is all the biology you need to know in 30 seconds. Our body is made out of organs. Our organs are made out of cells and in every cell there's this thing called messenger RNA or RNA for short that transmits the critical information from the DNA, our genes to the protein, which is really the stuff we're all made out of. This is the critical information that determines what a cell will actually do. And so we think of it like an operating system. And so if you could actually change that, which we call the software of life, if you could introduce a line of code or change a line of code, it turns out that has profound implications for everything. So many of us get a vaccine. What is a vaccine? It is an injection in our arm where we get bits and pieces of the virus, the proteins, and that teaches our immune system to recognize the virus.

And so when we get infected, we're not sick. Now imagine if instead of giving the protein, we would give the instructions on how to make the protein, how the body can make its own vaccine. That's an RNA vaccine, and here's what it looks like from the cell. So the traditional approach has protein floating around your cells, and mRNA vaccine approach has the cells themselves in your own body making the vaccine. What's more alarming? A stranger prowling the neighborhood are somebody who just broke into your ground floor and tripped the alarm. That's what happens with an mRNA vaccine. You've tripped the alarm wire, and now the cell is dialing 9-1-1. It's calling the police at the same time as it's making the protein and saying, that's the bad guy. If you think about what it is, we're trying to do. We've taken information and our understanding of that information and how that information is transmitted in a cell. And we've taken it our understanding of medicine and how to make drugs. And we're fusing the two. We think of it as information therapy.