How Moderna’s CIO helps steer the drugmaker’s post-COVID evolution

When Brad Miller became the chief information officer at drugmaker Moderna in early 2023, he already had a strong background in finance and technology, but no expertise in health care.

“Learning about pharma and biotech was really critical,” says Miller, who had previously been CIO at Capital One, held leadership roles at Mastercard, and spent 17 years in engineering at Amazon and Microsoft.

To get up to speed, he read books about drug discovery at the recommendation of Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel, listened to podcasts, and held “Regulatory 101” sessions with the company's regulatory affairs chief to understand how Moderna's drugs graduated from research to clinical trials, and finally to manufacturing.

Miller joined Moderna at an inflection point. With demand for its COVID vaccines slipping, the company has set a goal of introducing up to 15 drugs over a five-year period to treat cancer along with rare and infectious diseases. A respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) shot, which will be Moderna’s second drug in the market following its COVID shot that debuted during the pandemic, is poised for a U.S. approval decision by May and will generate $280 million in revenue this year, according to analyst estimates.

“We were a research company,” says Miller. But with a bigger focus on clinical trials these days, Moderna has had to lean on different technology to support its evolution. One example is the use of generative artificial intelligence to better understand the doses needed to make drugs effective in clinical trials. Moderna is now processing that data within a matter of days, rather than weeks.

Part of what lured Miller to Moderna was that it had been built on newer technology. He wouldn’t have to move data from legacy systems to the cloud. Also, AI was already deeply ingrained into the culture, including for drug design, clinical trial operations, and manufacturing.

But there were still a few skeletons in Moderna's closet. It had been exploring a multi-cloud strategy, in which compute and storage were with several different cloud providers. Miller put a stop to it and has instead placed a single bet on Amazon Web Services. "Let's get great at one cloud," explains Miller. "I didn't want to spend really, really valuable resources having to deploy that in multiple clouds and multiple environments."

Miller also discovered that Moderna had 18 different contract companies building over 30 different websites. That was untenable, and he worked quickly to empower Moderna’s engineers to do that work internally.

Amid the frantic pace of the pandemic, Moderna has also become more responsible with what it spends on compute and storage. “It's really about bringing the engineering excellence principles that I learned at Amazon and Microsoft, and how to build great software at scale, to Moderna,” says Miller.

One project Miller steered last year was the launch of mChat, the company’s internally developed generative AI product. Lately, use of mChat by Moderna's employees has been slipping as the company leans more on ChatGPT’s Enterprise, a business version of the popular OpenAI tool that was designed to address concerns about corporate data security. “OpenAI surpassed us,” says Miller, explaining the pivot. Today, 80% of the company’s employees use either mChat or ChatGPT Enterprise daily.

Within the first two months of the launch of ChatGPT Enterprise, Moderna says the first 500 users who were onboarded have created more than 700 GPTs. GPTs are customizable versions of ChatGPT that can be used for a variety of tasks, including data analytics or creating images, without any coding experience.

“They're not using it as just a conversational engine or a search engine,” says Miller. “Because of the training process we brought our employee base through, they understand the value of what GPT can do for them.”

John Kell

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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com