During a press conference at the White House yesterday (August 11), US President Donald Trump announced an agreement with biotechnology company Moderna worth $1.5 billion to produce 100 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine.

Moderna is a company co-founded and chaired by Noubar Afeyan.

During this time, he also founded or co-founded five other companies.

Moderna has faced many doubts since its inception, with its unproven drug production method – using mRNA technology, and has not brought any products to market for many years.

Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel.

In 2011, Afeyan approached Stéphane Bancel – an experienced engineer who had worked as a leader at pharmaceutical companies Eli Lilly and bioMerieux.

Bancel received Afeyan’s offer with suspicion.

The turning point came in 2013, when Bancel convinced pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca to pay $240 million for the rights to drugs created from Moderna’s research.

Moderna’s manufacturing facility in Norwood, Massachusetts.

However, at the beginning of this year, Moderna was still an unknown name, until they produced a Covid-19 vaccine that was considered very potential and was put into testing at an unprecedented speed.

`If Moderna used traditional vaccine development technologies, the company would probably still be in the research process and could not even begin production as it is achieving,` Bancel told Business Insider.

Thanks to progress in creating a Covid-19 vaccine, Moderna shares listed on the Nasdaq have more than tripled compared to the beginning of the year.

Moderna is racing against time and pressure to produce a vaccine.

The challenge of developing the first Covid-19 vaccine in the US also means that Bancel and his colleagues are under even more pressure.

`Our culture is one of constant effort. Moderna’s ability to respond quickly to the coronavirus pandemic is the result of nine years of hard work,` Bancel said.