March 17
@
4:00 PM
–
5:00 PM
Room 1610 Engineering Hall
Nedim Emil Altaras
SVP Technical Development Lead
Moderna Therapeutics, Cambridge, MA
Pressure Is a Privilege: Industrializing an mRNA Platform for Speed, Scale, and Reliability
As a chemical engineer, I think of our profession as the discipline of translating fundamentals into working systems: reducing complex problems to first principles, quantifying constraints, and designing processes that perform in the real world. Over the past decade at Moderna, that mindset was tested in the most consequential setting. I built the Technical Development capabilities that supported pandemic readiness and then worked from Day 1 of the Covid-19 pandemic to translate an mRNA vaccine from sequence to reproducible clinical and commercial supply.
This lecture is about industrialization—moving from a working process to a scalable, controlled manufacturing system. It is not simply “making more.” It is establishing a platform that can execute with short cycle times while maintaining process capability and product quality. I will describe what it takes to industrialize an mRNA platform when time becomes the first-class design constraint: parallelizing development, standardizing unit operations/interfaces, and using modular manufacturing approaches so performance can be robustly replicated across equipment, sites, and teams.
The same platform and operational discipline that proved itself under pandemic pressure has continued to translate beyond a single product—supporting additional licensed vaccines and extending into therapeutics, including individualized oncology programs and rare-disease efforts.
I will frame the experience around three engineering priorities: speed, scale, and reliability. Speed comes from clear decision rules under uncertainty, risk-based development plans, and rapid feedback from analytics and manufacturing. Scale is achieved by designing robustness to variability, building standard work for technology transfer, and ensuring consistent execution across the network. Reliability—and the assurance to defend it—is built through characterization, a defined control strategy, comparability to enable lifecycle changes, and documentation discipline that makes data and decisions defendable.
Ultimately, pressure is a privilege because it reflects responsibility: responsibility to solve problems that matter, to build systems that hold up under scrutiny, and to translate engineering work into human impact with life changing mRNA medicines.