How Moderna Is Using AI To Take On Cancer

Can AI help us fight cancer more effectively? Moderna is putting that promise to the test, using AI to help design personalized treatments and rethink how a pharmaceutical company operates.

Its approach offers a lesson for any business trying to do more with less: put AI to work across the organization, from the laboratory to the legal department.

Founded in 2010, Moderna became a household name through its COVID-19 vaccine. Yet at the end of 2025, it had just 4,700 employees, compared with around 75,000 each at pharmaceutical giants Merck and Pfizer, making its ambitions all the more striking.

In 2024, Moderna laid out plans to bring up to 15 new products to market over five years. Its leadership suggested that delivering on those ambitions using traditional approaches might require 100,000 employees, compared with around 6,000 using technology and AI. This was a vision for scaling the business, rather than a demonstrated productivity gain.

Part of the reason Moderna punches above its weight is its commitment to putting AI at the heart of its operations, from research and development to commercial operations, legal work and manufacturing.

So, what does that look like in practice, and what can other businesses learn?

How Moderna Is Using AI Today

Moderna was founded specifically to develop mRNA therapies. In simple terms, these use instructions that tell cells to make specific proteins to help prevent or fight disease. Its philosophy frames this as a software engineering challenge, programming cells much as we program computers.

In 2026, its personalized cancer therapy intismeran autogene, developed in collaboration with Merck, was shown to improve the length of time patients with high-risk melanoma remained cancer-free after surgery when combined with Keytruda, compared with Keytruda alone. This marked the first successful phase 3 trial of a personalized mRNA-based cancer therapy. The announcement reported topline results, with the full data still to come.