This week we had the pleasure of interviewing Juan Carlos Gil, CEO of the pharmaceutical company, Moderna.

Tell us briefly about your professional background and role in the company.

My professional career started in the pharmaceutical sector and, after 30 years, I am still dedicated to it. I am honored to witness the advances and innovations achieved in this industry. In addition, being part of Moderna's global team is a dream and a professional challenge for me, since, in my opinion, this company is destined to transform medicine. We will see it in the not so distant future.

Prior to joining Moderna, I held the position of CEO of the Vaccines Unit of MSD, being responsible for the strategy and execution of vaccine access programs in Spain. I also held the position of Commercial and Market Expansion Director at Sanofi MSD for the entire vaccine portfolio. Previously, I was part of Merck Serono, a company in which I held management positions for more than 11 years, contributing my experience and knowledge in the areas of operations, sales, market, and strategy for Europe, Canada, and Australia. And prior to this, for approximately 10 years, I was part of the Novartis Consumer Health team, with responsibilities in marketing and sales.

What is Moderna's mission and vision? How do you define yourselves as a company?

In 2010, two engineers and a molecular biologist decided to start a project based on the research and development of vaccines and treatments focused on messenger RNA (mRNA) technology. This is a technology that allows vaccines to be developed in a few months, something that broke with the schemes of what was previously known about vaccine R&D. When Covid-19 arrived, Moderna had already been researching coronavirus colds for six years, so they had the knowledge and mRNA technology necessary to develop a vaccine quickly and safely, and the availability of the vaccine against Covid-19 was our first milestone.

Taking advantage of the power of mRNA, we have a clear mission to create a new generation of transformative drugs for patients. Our product portfolio shows the progress we are making in the clinical programs currently in development to create mRNA drugs with the potential to prevent and/or treat respiratory diseases, cancer, rare diseases, and latent viruses such as HIV, CMV, or EBV. As for how we define ourselves, the Covid-19 health crisis placed us at the center of a very complex scenario, one that we were able to respond to quickly thanks to science. We have contributed with our vaccines to the control of one of the worst pandemics that has occurred in recent years, and this has undoubtedly marked our identity. But Moderna is more than the vaccine. We are a stamp of innovation, personalized medicine, and, ultimately, a real alternative to improve the health and lives of millions of people, a "brand" that we want to maintain for a long time.

What is the differential element or what are you most proud of in Moderna?

Undoubtedly, our mRNA technology platform. As I mentioned before, for over a decade Moderna has been working on researching and producing different medicines through its mRNA platform. It is this same technology that is allowing us great flexibility and agility in creating and offering effective solutions in record time to fight, now and in the future, against diseases, some of them without any therapeutic option available. As a platform, mRNA technology is incredibly versatile. In some cases, such as with Covid-19, these proteins can train the immune system to fight the disease. In others, such as with enzyme deficiencies, they can replace defective or absent proteins that are essential for survival.

Our goal is to use the platform to prevent or treat a wide range of diseases, from infectious diseases to cancer, autoimmune diseases, and rare diseases. mRNA technology has the potential to solve problems that are impossible for traditional drug development platforms. Speed is a clear differentiating factor: if we have the sequence of a virus, we can create a testable vaccine in days instead of months or even years and administer them against multiple viruses in a single injection. In addition, with mRNA therapies, we can give people instructions to manufacture various drugs with their own bodies instead of depending on foreign proteins made in animal cells.

What role does innovation play within the company you represent?

Innovation is the foundation of our work. It is what drives our scientists to research and develop new vaccines and treatments, and the company as a whole to provide effective therapeutic solutions to the medical community and society that can prevent and treat some of the diseases that have the greatest impact on the population. In addition, to ensure that innovation does not stop and to promote new avenues of research, Moderna has launched "mRNA Access," a program that offers researchers the use of our mRNA technology to explore new vaccines against emerging or neglected infectious diseases. This program will also allow researchers to explore new vaccine designs against prototype viral families in preparation for "Disease X." The WHO gave this name to Disease X to represent the knowledge that a severe international epidemic could be caused by a pathogen that is currently unknown as a cause of human diseases.

It is undeniable that in recent years, Moderna has played an important role in containing the COVID-19 virus. How would you define the social impact of your company?

We are very pleased that society perceives us as a leading company that has brought great solutions. Right now, we are a "firm" almost as well-known as other major players in the pharmaceutical industry, despite having a shorter track record. On the other hand, it is clear that the COVID-19 vaccine has been an opportunity for us. It has been our window to the world and our introduction letter, but we need the population to discover that we are much more and learn more about our activity and the possibilities of our pipeline. Currently, we are developing a pan-respiratory vaccine that includes COVID, flu, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). We also have a very ambitious global project to have vaccines against the 15 pathogens that the World Health Organization (WHO) considers of greatest concern for public health worldwide in clinical trial phase by 2025. These include HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, chikungunya, Zika, dengue, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, Ebola, Marburg hemorrhagic fever, Lassa fever, MERS, Nipah, Rift Valley fever, and severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome. And one of the most promising developments is the personalized cancer vaccine. We are going to achieve the first vaccine against cancer, a disease that is different for each individual. We recently announced phase 2b results in melanoma, which are very promising as we have demonstrated that the vaccine is capable of educating the immune system to recognize cancer.

Why did you choose to partner with AmChamSpain?

At Moderna, we are continually looking for travel companions who bring value and help us to boost our activity and fulfill the mission of improving people's lives. Because of its experience and prestige, we know that AmChamSpain is a guarantee to achieve everything we set out to do. The US Chamber of Commerce in Spain is undoubtedly a great ally to continue promoting the innovations and business opportunities of our company, both nationally and internationally, and to strengthen and publicize the investment and commitment that Moderna is making in Spain for its access to talent, the quality of infrastructure, as well as the investment in science and innovation.