Welcome to Texas ProRata, where we take just 10 minutes to get you smarter on the conclusion of tech, business, and politics.

Sponsored by Bridge Bank. Be bold. Venture wisely. I'm Dan Pramak. On today's show, Amazon staffs up,

and old Hollywood turns to streaming. But first, the race for a cure. Yesterday, a woman in Seattle became America's first human subject of a novel coronavirus

vaccine trial.

This potential civilization saver is based on a formulation selected by Moderna Therapeutics in

collaboration with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

What's particularly notable here is that Moderna isn't an old line legacy pharma company. In fact, most people outside of life sciences circles

had never even heard of them before they went public just 14 months ago without a single

product in market. Moderna as a company was developed in the offices of a venture capital firm,

just as stones throw away from MIT

in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with the idea that you could basically use something called

messenger RNA or MRNA to help people make medicines and vaccines within their own cells.

And this is different than how biotech usually works where they make a product in a lab

and then patients either swallow it or inject it.

This Moderna process should, in theory, make its drugs faster and cheaper to produce,

in part because it doesn't need to create giant bespoke manufacturing facilities for each new

formulation. In this particular case, Medina was already working with NIAID on coronavirus vaccines when word came out about the novel

coronavirus.

Chinese authorities released the new one's genetic code on January 11th and just a few days

later, Moderna was already at work on it, focusing all of its efforts and designing its

vaccine on a computer without even having the virus inside its labs.

To be clear, modernist process may move fast in terms of vaccines. its vaccine on a computer without even having the virus inside its labs.

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