REPORTAGE. At the headquarters of Moderna in Boston, we are delighted with the success of the small start-up which has become a producer of vaccines for the whole world.

“CVs of candidates who want to be hired by us, I have plenty on my desk. There are far too many for me to count!”, laughs Tracey Franklin. She is Moderna’s Director of Human Resources, so she was first-hand to see the company’s evolution.

“Now we have a name, a reputation. Everyone knows us. We receive applications from all over the worldshe says. We are hiring everywhere. Besides, our boss, Stéphane Bancel, is French. Either we spot the talents, the crème de la crème of scientists, and we contact them, or they apply directly.”

It must be said that Moderna is one of the biggest successes of the last ten years. By developing one of the two messenger RNA vaccines against Covid-19 which have flooded the world in recent months, the American company based in Boston recorded 18.5 billion in turnover last year. “The day we received the first results of our vaccine was in the summer of 2020. When we saw that it was working, everyone here was super excited, enthusiastic”remembers Tracey Franklin.

“We were a small company. We were only 800, you can imagine. We had responsibility for the vaccine for the whole world. So, very quickly, we had to develop our production capacity.

Tracey Franklin, Moderna HR Director

at franceinfo

A huge leap forward for the one who was, before the Covid, only a “biotech”, a biotechnology start-up, which had never made money and which, since then, has continued to grow. The company also had to change scale very quickly to keep up with the production rate of the vaccine. “We have doubled in size”says Tracey Franklin, whose human resources team has grown from 30 to 70 people. “We had to hire in all sectors: in medicine, vaccine safety, manufacturing and marketing. Now we are 3,000 employees”she explains.

More employees, and therefore more space. Moderna occupied at its creation, only 11 years ago, a few floors of this 10-storey building in Cambridge, near Boston, where Tracey Franklin welcomes us. She now owns the entire building, as well as another site in suburban Boston. Despite this, Moderna still finds itself cramped. The company therefore built a huge headquarters a few steps away.

Because the company, which is now one of the big names in the pharmaceutical sector, does not intend to stop there. “We still have a ton of work ahead of us with, at the moment, several vaccine and drug projects”, says Tracey Franklin. There is indeed the project of a Covid vaccine adapted to the Omicron variant, but it is not the only vaccine that the company would like to develop. It aims to develop the vaccine against HIV, but also against Ebola, malaria or even monkeypox. Whatever it does, the company knows it is expected at the turn.