One of the chief advantages of the messenger RNA vaccine technology used by Moderna as well as Pifzer and BioNTech is the ease by which it can be adapted.
At the core of mRNA vaccines is a nucleic acid sequence encoding for a target viral protein, like the coronavirus’ characteristic spike. In the case of Moderna’s shot, determining the right sequence took researchers at Moderna and the U.S. National Institutes of Health just two days after Chinese researchers first posted the coronavirus genome online. A Phase 1 clinical trial followed roughly 60 days later.
