Moderna lapped the drug industry in crafting a coronavirus vaccine candidate, zooming past Big Pharma competitors that dwarf the company in size and resources.

Instead, Moderna has pitched the world on the promise of its unproven technology as a new class of medicine — messenger RNA.

Moderna has long been one of the buzziest startups in the wonky world of biotech.

The young Harvard scientist also pitched another legend in biotech: Noubar Afeyan.

Around that time, Afeyan said, he had enough confidence that it was a "matter of engineering" to get mRNA to work.

That name would come later — Moderna was incorporated as LS18, Inc., named in Flagship's typical style of creating numbered companies until they are ready to take a leap forward.

Stephane Bancel had joined the board of one of Flagship's testing companies a few years prior, and Afeyan said he noticed his intensity and creativity.

A decade into the Moderna experiment, Bancel remains CEO, Afeyan is chairman and Langer still sits on the board.

"Every biotech company ends up being discussed as a romantic struggle-against-the-odds," Afeyan said.

The early years of Moderna were also shrouded in secrecy.

Afeyan said Moderna was an easy target because it had massive ambitions, and the reporting mistook secrecy for a lack of science.

The December 2018 IPO was the largest for any biotech: Moderna took in $563 million in net proceeds and was valued at roughly $7.5 billion.

By the end of the decade, Moderna had sprung up from Rossi's stem cell research into a biotech force.

At the start of 2020, Bancel mapped out a year focused on a vaccine for CMV, one of the world's most common viruses.

After reading the piece, Bancel emailed an NIH vaccine director Moderna works closely with about the virus.

Working alongside the NIH, roughly 100 Moderna employees developed a vaccine candidate in record time, becoming the first to start human trials in mid-March. .

That's the theory, as there are no approved mRNA vaccines or drugs. The technology is so new it hasn't been tried for any disease in a large-scale clinical trial, which would demonstrate if it actually works.

If its mRNA technology works, the coronavirus vaccine would be its first real-world use.

At the same time, Moderna is ramping up production to have tens of millions of doses by year's end, eventually scaling to produce 1 billion doses a year.

From the start, Moderna has talked about itself more like a software company than a typical drug company.

Rossi pitched the earliest investors on mRNA as a platform, with diseases becoming its "killer apps." Bancel refers to the early years as "Moderna 1.0," like an antiquated version of a computer program.

Several other biotechs are crafting mRNA vaccines, with some companies having worked on the technology for even longer than Moderna.

Most biotechs start with a single project to test out a concept like mRNA.

From the early years, Moderna executives have outlined dozens, if not more than 100, ongoing preclinical projects.

It's here where mRNA, which Moderna dubs "the software of life," has taken shape

First, Moderna has to prove its coronavirus vaccine works

GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Pfizer, and Sanofi accounted for more than 80% of the $35 billion in 2019 vaccine sales, Moderna said in a recent presentation

To support its research and prepare to pump out millions of vaccine doses, Moderna has raised $1.8 billion in stock sales in the first few months of 2020

Under the spotlight of the pandemic, Moderna is leading the biotech industry in the eyes of the public

When it released preliminary human results on May 18 for its experimental coronavirus vaccine, the biotech didn't provide any actual data

William Haseltine, a former biotech CEO and Harvard Medical School professor argued in The Washington Post this was "publication by press release," and that it is "damaging trust in the fundamental methods of science and medicine at a time when we need it most."

The company isn't hiding negative results, Afeyan said, but allowing the NIH to release the data when it wants, as it controls the study — not Moderna

If Moderna conquers the coronavirus, its mRNA platform will be well on its way to revolutionizing medicine and realizing the potential it first set out to achieve a decade ago

Even with all the confidence of a biotech that has smashed record after record, the billionaires running Moderna are humble in the face of the virus.