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In what may now seem like distant memories, Moderna was one of the heroes of the Covid era, bringing their mRNA based Spikevax vaccine to Europe less than a year after lockdowns were first implemented.
The US-based company had gone public on the NASDAQ just a few years earlier in 2018 and broke records as the biggest biotech IPO at the time. This record has since been broken by Sana Biotechnology in 2021, Kailera Therapeutics in early 2026 and most recently by Parabilis Medicines who raised a whopping $670 million on 10 June 2026.
Following a boom in share prices linked to their Covid vaccine, Moderna has seen its valuation continue to drop over the past 5 years. But they are confident that is about to change and results so far in 2026 are showing a hint of optimism.
“COVID happened and so we took a little detour with trying to do our duty to help people… since then [we] went back onto mission,” CEO of Moderna Stéphane Bancel explained.
“We started the company and then went public on this belief that mRNA is a very powerful technology and that over time, we should be able to make medicine in many therapeutic areas: cancer, infectious disease, rare genetic disease and more.”
In this episode of The Big Question, Stéphane joined Mared Gwyn in the studio to discuss the future of Moderna and the state of Europe’s preparedness.
Is another pandemic coming?
“So we believe that there’s always a risk of a big pandemic and it could be either from nature or it could be man-made,” Stéphane told The Big Question.
“If something big were to happen like a pandemic we will be able to go even faster than we went in 2020 because now we have a manufacturing infrastructure. There’s a big factory in America, we have also factories in Canada, in the UK, in Australia, so the world is much better already, Moderna is much better already.”
And although Moderna is a US company, Stéphane is a European and he fears for his homeland.
BioNTech, the German biotechnology company who partnered with Pfizer for the Comirnaty Covid vaccine which became one of the most widely used across the planet, announced in May that they were closing their manufacturing sites in Germany.
After the end of 2026, the Comirnaty vaccine will be produced by US partner Pfizer.
“So if you look at it today, on continental Europe, there is no mRNA manufacturing capacity,” Stéphane warned.
“And so what we’re trying to do at Moderna is to work with the European Union, trying to work with several governments around Europe to figure out how can we do a partnership like we have done in Canada or in the UK or in Australia, because we think it’s important for Europe to have mRNA on its soil.”
“You could have something really bad happen in Europe and there is no industrial base to go and fight it.”
Could a cancer vaccine save Moderna’s share price?
Moderna, like BioNTech, are now focusing their mRNA platform technology on other therapeutic areas, such as cancer treatment.
They recently announced a new treatment for Lynch syndrome, a genetic condition which limits a person’s ability to repair faulty DNA and doubles a patient’s chances of developing certain cancers.
Stéphane hopes their vaccine will help prevent cancer from developing in those with Lynch syndrome whilst simultaneously boosting the company’s fortunes.
“We’re going on our pre-pandemic strategy… we have now four infectious disease vaccines approved by the European regulators, we have more in phase three that should get data this year in 2026, and we have a lot of products like the Lynch syndrome products.
“So we are diversifying the portfolio, we are going back into sales growth this year, I mean with COVID we always expected our sales to drop a lot after the pandemic, […] but then the whole portfolio and with the strength of the (mRNA) platform to allow to grow the sales again – that’s what we’re doing this year.”
The Big Questionis a series from Euronews Business where we sit down with industry leaders and experts to discuss some of the most important topics on today’s agenda.
Watch the video above to see the full discussion with Moderna.