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Moderna CEO and cofounder Stéphane Bancel probably never imagined hed look back on March 2023 as the good old days. Then, he merely had to go before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee and take a spitty dressing-down from Senator Bernie Sanders over the price of Modernas COVID vaccine. The company was held up as a poster child for corporate greed. For a U.S. pharma executive, though, that was more or less business as usual. Today, the situation is anything but. With the confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent anti-vaxxer, to be the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services this February, once-fringe medical theories have been escalated to the level of policy, throwing established scientific and regulatory norms into doubt. Among drugmakers, perhaps none is worse situated to absorb the D.C. vibe shift than Moderna, which is now being targeted not for its pricing but for its one and only product: mRNA-based vaccines. Kennedy has shown a particular distaste for mRNA vaccines, such as those that were rapidly developed by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech in response to the global outbreak of COVID-19. During the height of the pandemic, Kennedy petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to revoke authorization for COVID-19 vaccines and not approve any future ones, saying that the risks of adverse reactions and death werent adequately studied. These vaccineswhich have been safely administered to billions of people around the world and in 2021 alone saved at least an estimated 14.4 million lives worldwidehave been the subject of conspiracy theories and misinformation since they were first authorized for emergency use in late 2020. Among the debunked claims of critics: the vaccines can alter a persons genome; they contain microchips or tracking devices; They cause something dubbed turbo cancer. Several states, including Florida, Kentucky, South Carolina, Idaho, and Texas are considering laws that would severely limit or ban the use of mRNA vaccines. Louisiana and Texas have already ended mass vaccinations and any promotion of the vaccines. Now, Kennedys HHS is taking action against Modernas signature product. In the past month alone, the CDC has revised its public health recommendations for COVID-19 vaccines, the FDA altered its vaccine approval process, and the government canceled a $766 million contract with Moderna to develop new vaccines against pandemic threats including H5N1 avian influenza. Taken together, these moves have effectively knee-capped Modernas business. Theyve also jeopardized public health, and spread uncertainty across the burgeoning landscape of next-generation RNA-based therapeutics. Moderna can ill afford an unfavorable regulatory environment, much less an administration seemingly bent on its destruction. The company, which declined to make executives available for this story, took in $3.2 billion last yearless than half of the year priorat a net loss of $3.6 billion. For the first quarter this year, it brought in $100 million at a $1 billion loss. Although Moderna launched an RSV vaccine last year and is developing a personalized cancer immunotherapy, almost all of its money still comes from sales of COVID-19 shots, which are steadily declining. And with its entire technology under attack, Modernas future looks anything but certain. Going all in on mRNA While most pharma companies have grown by establishing franchises in particular diseases, Moderna has always been all-in on Bancels conception of a biotech platform company. The entire premise is right there in its ticker symbol: mRNA. The promise of the technology is appealing. Older vaccines typically consist of weakened or killed viruses, or parts of viruses, to mimic an infection and elicit an immune response. These vaccines are grown in eggs or cell cultures, purified, and mixed with adjuvants that help them work in the body. Historically, developing vaccines in this way has taken anywhere from 5 to 10 years. But mRNA vaccines dont require any viruses, or eggs. Instead, they work by delivering into the body genetic instructions, in the form of mRNA molecules, that cells use to manufacture a protein called an antigen, which induces an immune response. The original COVID vaccine contained mRNA instructions to produce a signature spike protein found on the surface of the coronavirus. Because mRNA is digitallike DNA, it encodes a series of nucleotide letters (A, U, G, C)creating new mRNA vaccines is a relatively simple matter of rearranging these letters to create a different antigen. mRNA is made in an egg- and cell-free manufacturing process, and once the sequence for a vaccine has been selected, it can be manufactured in as little as a few weeks. This speed and flexibility are what enabled the development of a working vaccine for COVID within a year of its discovery. And it is why many experts in infectious disease believe mRNA vaccines are an essential tool in responding to future pandemic threats. Bancel has been banking on mRNA not only as a vaccine platform but also as a breakthrough way of treating cancer and other diseases. Until last year, though, Moderna had brought just one product to the market: the Spikevax vaccine for COVID-19. In 2021, the company sold 807 million doses, pocketing $17.7 billion. The companys stock soaredin 2021, Modernas market cap hovered around $200 billion, surpassing legacy drugmakers including GlaxoSmithKline, Amgen, and Merck. But demand for the vaccines has abated quickly. In 2022, Moderna had $18.4 billion in vaccine sales. In 2023, the year the public health emergency was declared over and the federal government phased out paying for the vaccine doses, Modernas sales were less than $7 billion. Last year, they more than halved yet again. Modernas second commercial product, an mRNA vaccine for Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) was approved by the FDA in May 2024, for people 60 years and older. Marketed as mRESVIA, it had total 2024 sales of $25 million. At the start of this year, Modernas stock was down about 90% from its pandemic peak. Modernas cash reserve, meanwhile, has dwindled from $18.2 billion at the end of 2022 to $8.4 billion today. Last fall, Bancel announced a plan to cut R&D spending by $1.1 billion by 2027 and to shelve five early-stage programs. This January, he said at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference that the company would cut $1 billion in spending this year alone, and find another $500 million in cuts next year. As Moderna, which was founded in 2010, grew from 800 employees pre-pandemic to 5,600 full-time global employees at the end of 2023, it gained a reputation as a tough workplace that burned through talent. Even so, its recent departures have signaled a company in turmoil. Since late 2023, when chief commercial officer Arpa Garay left the company less than two years after joining from Merck, his former duties have been split between Bancel, covering sales and marketing, and Modernas president Stephen Hoge responsible for commercial pipeline strategy and medical affairs. In November 2024, Hoge took charge of sales, as well. Stephen and Stephane will go down with the ship, says a former employee speaking on background. Theyre a $10 billion company nowhow does that save them? Theyre in a really bad position. Others are jumping. This February, CIO Brad Millerwhod been driving the companys tech-driven insights for just over two yearsretired at age 52, as Moderna downsized its digital departments by about 50 employees, or 10%. Pharma folks took notice in March, when Kate Cronin, whod led marketingsince 2021, left the company and a month later joined Medtronic Diabetes. When Kate Cronin left, I thought, thats the rat leaving the sinking ship, says another industry insider. Multiple employees in communications roles have also recently left the company. Keeping up with the FDA and CDC Modernas pipeline includes vaccines for everything from shingles to HIV, as well as therapeutics for cancer and rare diseases. But near-term, its hopes had been riding on a new, improved COVID vaccine, along with a first-of-its-a-kind combination COVID-flu vaccine. In the last couple of weeks, though, those hopes have been tempered, if not crushed, by changes at the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which taken together could dramatically limit who will get access to such vaccines moving forwardand determine whether companies like Moderna will continue to make them at all. On May 31, Moderna had a partial win when the FDA approved its next-generation COVID-19 vaccine, called mNEXSPIKE. But unlike its predecessor, which is licensed for use for all individuals 12 years of age and older, regardless of health-risk statusit was authorized for use only for people aged 65 and older, or aged 12 to 64 with a qualifying medical condition. (The FDAs delayed approval in May of a non-mRNA COVID vaccine made by Novavax had the same restrictions.) People aged 65 and older account for the majority of COVID vaccines, and benefit the most from their protection. In previous years, as long as updated COVID shots showed evidence that they generated a comparable immune response to the previous years version, the FDA approved them for use for most people. Now, to get approval for anyone under 65 and without an underlying medical condition, vaccine makers will have to show additional safety and efficacy data from randomized controlled trials. (The FDA and its advisers had previously considered it unfeasible to run such trials quickly enough.) Calling for robust, gold-standard data on persons at low risk,” the new requirements were put forth without the usual input from independent outside advisers. Between 100 million to 200 million Americans (of a total population of 347 million) would be eligible for COVID vaccines under the new approach, according to an estimate cited by FDA commissioner Martin Makary and Vinay Prasad, director of the FDAs Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. But the changes in the approval processas a new, highly transmissible COVID subvariant has been detected in California, heightening the risk of a summer wavecould leave a lot of people unprotected in the 20252026 season. On June 3, Kennedy announced on X that Moderna had agreed to a true placebo-controlled trial of the new vaccine; its not yet clear how that will impact availability of the 20252026 vaccine. Moderna declined to comment in response to Kennedys statement on X. Further clouding the vaccination landscape is new CDC guidance about who should get an annual COVID booster. On May 28, Kennedy announced he was rescinding the governments recommendation that pregnant women and healthy children get COVID immunizations. Without this recommendation, health insurersincluding Medicaidwill not likely cover the cost of the vaccine. A couple of days later, the CDC partially contradicted Kennedy, advising that kids continue to get the vaccinebut only in consultation with a healthcare provider. It offered no additional guidance for pregnant women, who have higher risk for health complications from COVID. Meanwhile, Moderna has voluntarily withdrawn its application for approval of its new combo flu/COVID vaccine after the FDA requested more efficacy data. Moderna expects to have additional data this summer, but it declined to share a target date for resubmitting its application. Shutting down avian flu research Perhaps the biggest recent blow to Modernas prospects came last week, when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services terminated a contract with the company to develop vaccines against several strains of flu with pandemic potential, including the highly pathogenic avian flu viruses H1N1 and H7N9. Moderna had won the contractoriginally worth $176 million but expanded in the last days of the Biden administration by another $590 millionon the belief that mRNA vaccines would be a critical part of any future pandemic response. Andrew Nixon, director of communications at HHS, told STAT that the agency had ended the contract because continued investment in Modernas H5N1 mRNA vaccine was not scientifically or ethically justifiable. The same day that news came out, Moderna shared data from its phase 1/2 trial of its avian flu vaccine, showing that three weeks after the second dose, nearly 98% of participants reached antibody levels considered protective. In a statement, Bancel wrote: “While the termination of funding from HHS adds uncertainty [ . . . ] we will explore alternative paths forward for the program. The scientific communitys reaction to HHSs moves has ranged from befuddlement to outrage. This MAHA approach to killing vaccine technologies for ideological reasons and nothing to do with vaccines is both foolish and deadly. It weakens our nations biosecurity, says Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, codirector of Texas Childrens Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, and codeveloper of the low-cost COVID vaccine Corbevax. It also reinforces my view that the MAHA movement is little more than an economic stimulus for the very corrupt wellness and influencer industry. We learned both from Ebola in Democratic Republic of Congo and COVID-19 that the single most important lesson of pandemic preparedness is to keep many vaccine technologies in play, because you cannot predict ahead of time which ones might rise to the top. There are currently three licensed H5N1 vaccines (made by GSK, CSL Seqirus, and Sanofi) that are either made in eggs or grown in cell culture. None are commercially available, though the government has been adding to its stockpile. Even so, getting an up-to-date version of these vaccines ready for broad distribution would take many months. An mRNA-based vaccine, in contrast, could be matched to the most recently circulated variant of the virus and manufactured rapidly. Other drugmakers, including GSK-Curevac and Pfizer, have been working on mRNA vaccines for avian flu. Its unclear what will happen to these programs now. Joe Payne, CEO of San Diego-based Arcturus Therapeutics, says that his company continues to have full support from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), which has committed up to $63 million to help advance the company’s avian flu vaccine. (Arcturus’s version uses self-amplifying mRNA, a new technology that works at lower doses than first-generation mRNA vaccines like Modernas.) This April, Arcturus received FDA Fast Track designation for the vaccine, which is currently being tested in a phase 1 trial. Arcturus has also developed a self-amplifying mRNA COVID vaccine with CSL Seqirus, which the companies aim to submit for FDA approval later this year. There’s been a desire in the scientific community and regulatory agencies to identify lower-dose alternatives, says Payne. The new FDA guidance, he says, is a positive development for us, because it’s a fair, balanced and professional communication on their COVID policy, where a couple months ago [under Trump], there was a lot of uncertainty. mRNA in the MAHA crosshairs The long-term bet on Moderna rides almost entirely on its individualized cancer therapy, mRNA-4157, which its developing in conjunction with Merck. While sometimes called a personal cancer vaccine, mRNA-4157 doesnt actually protect you from getting cancer, but instead trains the immune system to attack an existing tumor, using custom-made mRNA that encodes antigens specific to each persons cancer. The company has high hopes that the therapy can be used to treat multiple kinds of cancers. In Phase 2 trials, the therapy cut the risk of recurrence or death in advanced melanoma (after surgical resection) by 65% when combined with Mercks drug Keytruda, compared with Keytruda alone. Moderna also has trials underway or enrolling for its use in treating high-risk melanoma, non-small cell lung cancer, invasive bladder cancer, and adjuvant renal cell carcinoma. While these personalized treatments could be very lucrative for the company, they wont be easy to scale quickly. And the timeline for FDA approval is uncertain, depending on trial results and regulatory review. The melanoma study isnt expected to be fully complete until 2030, and the FDA has not been supportive of accelerated approval. Whether Moderna can hang on that long is an open question. In the meantime, a host of researchers and well-funded biotechs developing second- and third-generation therapies using mRNA and related technologies are quietly holding their breath, feeling that, for now, Kennedy and his lieutenants are concerned almost exclusively with examining the use of mRNA in protective vaccines for healthy people. Using mRNA for treating cancer and rare diseases seems to be a different story. In the past year or so, researchers at the University of Florida and Memorial Sloan Kettering have published promising results from small studies of personalized mRNA-based therapeutic vaccines for glioblastoma and pancreatic cancer, respectively. The next wave of mRNA is with inhaled mRNA and intravenously dosed mRNA to treat really serious and fatal rare disease conditions, says Payne at Arcturus. And that’s where we’re getting the warmest support from the new administration. There is a general belief that science will prevail, says another CEO of a venture-backed company focusing on therapeutic uses of self-amplifying mRNA. But there is anxiety from the uncertainty. Uncertainty is not good for anything. Perhaps no company knows that better than Moderna.
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This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here. Googles AI Studio and Labs let you experiment for free with new AI tools. I love the way these digital sandboxeslike the one from Hugging Facelet you try out creative new uses of AI. You can dabble around then download and share what you make, without having to master a complex new platform. Read on for a few Google AI experiments to try. All are free, fast, and easy to use. 1. Transform an image Upload a photo and use Geminis AI Studio Image Generation to transform it with prompts. Iterate on your original image until you get a version you like. The model understands natural language, so you dont have to master prompt lingo. 2. Generate an AI voice conversation AI-generated voices are increasingly hard to distinguish from human ones. If youre surprised, try Generate Speech in the AI Studio or Googles NotebookLM. How to use Generate Speech in Googles AI Studio Paste in text, either for a narration or a conversation between two people Open the settings tab to pick from 30 AI voices. Each is labeled with a characteristice.g. upbeat, gravelly, or mature. Click run to generate the conversation. Optionally adjust the playback speed. Download the file if you want to keep it, or paste in different text to try again. Example: a silly 90-sec chat between two violinists I scripted with Gemini and rendered quickly with this Generate Speech tool. Use case: Make a narration track for an instructional video. ElevenLabs has a better professional model for this, but AI Studios is free, easy and quick. Alternatives Googles Gemini AI app can also now generate audio overviews from files you upload, if youre on a paid plan. Googles free NotebookLM has a new mobile app, and now lets you generate an audio conversation in any of 50 languages. Unlike Generate Speech in AI Studio, NotebookLM audio overviews summarize your material, they dont perform words as written. Why NotebookLM is so useful. Googles Illuminate lets you generate, listen to, share, and download AI conversations about research papers and famous books. Heres an audio chat about David Copperfield, for example. A bit dry to listen to, but still useful. 3. Make a gif Try Magical Gif Maker, one of 20 showcase apps in the Build section of AI Studio. Try making a moving visual featuring the name of your publication, group, or event. I experimented with kinetic text and word art. Also worth trying in the Build AI Studio: Flashcard maker, Video to Learning App & Maps Planner. Alternative: You can also make a static image with Googles Imagen 3 or the new Imagen 4. Write a short prompt and select your preferred aspect ratio. So far I still prefer Ideogram (why I like it) and ChatGPTs new image engine. 4. Generate a short video Googles Veo 2 and Flow let you generate free short video clips almost instantly with a prompt. Create a clip to add vibrancy or humor to a presentation, or a visual metaphor to help you explain something. Here are 25 other quick ideas for how you might use little AI-generated video scenes. How to create a video clip with Veo 2 Pick a length (5 to 8 seconds) and select horizontal or vertical orientation Write a prompt & optionally upload a photo to suggest a visual direction Example: Take a look at a parakeet photo I started with and the 5-second video I generated from the photo with Veo 2. Tip: Convert short video clips into gifs for free with Ezgif or Giphy. Unlike vido files, gifs are easy to share and auto-play in an email or presentation. Whats next: Remarkably lifelike clips made with Googles newer Veo 3 model went viral this week. These AI-generated visualswith soundare only available on the $250/month(!) plan for now, so try Veo 2 for free. 5. Explain things with lots of tiny cats This playful mini app creates short, step-by-step visual guides using charming cat illustrations to explain any concept, from how a violin works to the concept behind the matrix. This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here.
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In the last 12 months, Target has publicly walked back its long-held DEI commitments, faced a weeks-long boycott from customers, and become one of several corporations that diminished its annual support for NYC Pride. But when June 1 rolled around, the company still trotted out its annual collection of Pride-inspired, rainbow-adorned merchand, for a number of reasons, its not landing well with queer customers. This years collection includes a series of apparel printed with slogans like Authentically Me and Glowing with Pride, rainbow-hued cat and dog doys, and, oddly enough, a couple of Pride-themed collectible bird figurines. Since the merch debuted, customers have been quick to notice an issue: Several of the items labels are printed with lorem ipsum filler copy. Targets pathetic 2025 Pride collection has arrived, one Reddit post on the subject reads. According to a spokesperson, Target is aware of the error, which it says originated with a vendor, and is working to address the issue. But for many customers, this labeling oversight feels like both a symptom and a symbol of larger issues at Target. For years, the company has turned Pride Month into a full-on branding extravaganza, releasing entire collections in stores and showing up as a sponsor at Pride parades across the country. In a series of events starting in 2023, though, Target has capitulated to rising conservative pressure, dialing back its Pride merch, ending its DEI commitments, and, this year, retreating from Pride parade sponsorship. Taken together, these factors make Targets 2025 Pride collection feel, at best, like a desperate bid to save face, and, at worst, like an attempt to cash in on a community that its too afraid to support outside of store walls. Targets retreat from Pride Target first launched pride products in 2015, and largely continued to expand its Pride-based inventory in the years following, openly doubling down on its support for the queer community during a bout of transphobic backlash in 2017. However, starting in 2023, the brands approach to Pride has been in flux. In May of 2023, CEO Brian Cornell told Fortunes Leadership Next podcast that the companys DEI efforts had fueled much of our growth over the last nine years. Mere weeks later, though, Target removed some items from its annual Pride collection after receiving an influx of conservative pushback, and even threats to its employees, over the items. The waters have been increasingly muddy for Targets Pride efforts ever since. In 2024, the company scaled back its Pride Month sections from all stores to only select locations and online. Then, this January, as companies across the country stepped back from DEI initiatives under the Trump administration, Target announced a series of its own concessions. The brand shared it was concluding certain goals and initiatives tied to racial equity in hiring, no longer participating in external surveys from the LGBTQ+ advocacy organization the Human Rights Campaign, and renaming its supplier diversity team to supplier engagement, shifting its focus away from explicitly courting brands with diverse ownership. To many loyal customers, this announcement felt like a betrayal, especially given that Target had previously been more vocal than its corporate peers on DEI initiativesand that the company has profited annually on Pride Month. This sparked a boycott of the brand that caused foot traffic to drop and share prices to plummet. In the aftermath, the Twin Cities pride parade announced that it would no longer accept Target as a sponsor. And, according to NYC Pride spokesperson Kevin Kilbride, Target was one of several brands that either backed out, reduced its contribution, or asked for its involvement to go unpublicized in the event. Targets retreat from Pride is part of a larger trend this year of corporations choosing not to renew their sponsorshipa pattern thats left many queer consumers wondering if corporate support was always just rainbow washing, or an attempt to signal affinity with LGBTQ+ customers merely to profit off of them. The [queer] community has been completely abandoned by a number of major companies, across a lot of brand categories, Joanna Schwartz, a professor at Georgia College & State University with a specialty in LGBTQ+ marketing, told Fast Company in May. The current prevailing wind is out of a far more conservative place, and companies are trying not to make anyone mad, but the companies that were really trying to make an easy buck off of the community were the first ones to leave. ‘Now they’re trying to keep getting our money, while denying our humanity’ Now that Pride Month has officially arrived, Target is left in a sticky situation. The company is attempting to walk a tightrope between avoiding a conservative outcry for its Pride merch while also striving not to alienate LGBTQ+ customers (who, according to a 2023 study by the investment adviser LGBT Capital, hold an estimated $3.9 trillion in global purchasing power). This year, Targets Pride collection looks fairly similar to last years and is, once again, only available in some locations. In a statement to Fast Company, a spokesperson shared, weare absolutely dedicated to fostering inclusivity for everyoneour team members, our guests, our supply partners, and the more than 2,000 communities were proud to serve. As we have for many years, we will continue to mark Pride Month by offering an assortment of celebratory products, hosting internal programming to support our incredible team, and sponsoring local events in neighborhoods across the country. Regardless of its intentions, Targets Pride merch is coming off decidedly hollow for queer customers this year, given its backtracking from the community at large. Whenever its time to profit off Pride, Target rolls out the rainbows, one X user wrote. But when it comes time to actually stand with the queer community? Crickets. Your Pride merch means nothing without a spine. On Reddit, users under a post regarding the unfinished lorem ipsum tags expressed discomfort with parts of the collection. One of the items is a moving truck figurine decked out in the lesbian flag and the phrase “Move N,” a reference to the concept of U-Hauling. Per Urban Dictionary, the slang term pokes fun at the stereotype of the speedy act of moving in together after a brief courtship between lesbians. One commenter called the figurine insulting AF. Others pointed out the lack of any reference to the trans or nonbinary communities. Still others were generally frustrated with the companys unreliable support. Gay folks never asked for Target to sell cheap low quality merch with rainbows splattered all over it, one user commented. All we asked for was to be treated fairly and allowed to live our lives. They made this shit to get our business. Now they’re trying to keep getting our money, while denying our humanity.
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