The total annual market for vaccinations is about $35 billion

Biotech firms Moderna and BioNTech used a biotechnology known as messenger RNA, or mRNA, to produce vaccines effective against Covid-19 with miraculous speed. That has pushed the combined worth of specialists in this emerging field to more than $120 billion. That’s a glimpse of what’s possible if it can be applied post-pandemic to treat cancer or rare diseases.

The technology is the closest thing yet to making medicine digital. MRNA vaccines essentially inject genetic code that instructs a recipients’ cells to construct a part of the virus. The body recognizes the produced protein as foreign and mounts a future immune response when exposed. Moderna and BioNTech’s vaccines show the technology works fast. Vaccines typically take a decade to develop. They took less than a year.

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