Moderna is revamping its digital team, eliminating 10% of roles under two digital departments, affecting about 50 employees, a person close to the matter told Fierce Pharma.
The layoffs are hitting “digital for business” and “digital core” functions within Moderna and were communicated to the affected staffers Wednesday, according to the person.
“As part of our ongoing cost efficiency efforts, we have made the difficult decision to reduce headcount,” a Moderna spokesperson said in a statement to Fierce. “We are grateful for the contributions of the impacted individuals.”
The IT workforce reductions come as Moderna’s chief information officer Brad Miller departs the mRNA biotech this month after a two-year stint. Tracey Franklin, the company’s human resources head, has taken on the title of chief people and digital technology officer.
“At @Moderna, we reimagined the way the HR and digital functions come together to advance how work is performed,” Franklin wrote in a LinkedIn post last week that shared a Fortune article about combining human and AI capabilities.
“In a lot of ways, the IT department of every company is going to be the HR department of AI agents in the future,” NVIDIA co-founder Jensen Huang said recently, as quoted by Fortune.
Moderna has placed a heavy emphasis on AI, hosting an investor event dedicated to the topic in November 2023.
“We believe that we must become a real-time AI company embedding AI in every aspect of our company,” Miller said at that event.
Moderna developed its own generative AI application called mChat and rolled it out company-wide. One of the biotech’s most valued pipeline assets, Merck & Co.-partnered individualized neoantigen therapy mRNA-4157 (V940), uses AI to tailor treatment to each cancer patient.
In 2023, Moderna saw its selling, general and administrative expenses increase by $417 million, or 37%, which were attributed primarily to increased headcount and spend in digital, medical affairs and commercial functions.
But in 2025, Moderna aims to reduce cash cost expenses by $1 billion, CEO Stéphane Bancel said at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in January. The company will report its 2024 full-year financial results, including its cash cost, Friday, Feb. 14.
“We basically reduced our net use of cash over the last few years, and we intend to continue to reduce that as we launch new products and get to profitability in 2028,” Bancel said at the conference.
As to where the cost cuts will come from, Bancel said he’s looking at the entire company across R&D, manufacturing, SG&A and productivity projects.
Before the JPM announcement, in the fall of 2024, Moderna unveiled a plan to cut R&D spending by $1.1 billion by 2027, while shelving five R&D programs.
Moderna is downsizing after suffering on the commercial front. In 2024, Modera’s share of the COVID vaccine market declined and its launch of the RSV shot, mRESVIA, was muted no thanks to an unfavorable CDC policy that has pulled back the entire market, Bancel acknowledged in his annual shareholder letter in January.
Bancel is counting on potentially three approvals this year as Moderna has filed with the FDA its next-generation COVID shot, mRNA-1283; mRESVIA for younger individuals 18 to 59 years of age; and a flu-COVID combo shot coded mRNA-1083. However, bitten by the mRESVIA launch, Moderna has decided not to include any new launch products in its annual revenue guidance.
At JPM, Bancel offered Moderna’s 2025 guidance to reach total revenue of between $1.5 billion and $2.5 billion, a step down from the $3 billion to $3.1 billion for 2024. Bancel attributed the lower estimate to a much smaller RSV market.
“[B]ecause of this uncertainty on the top line that we are seeing in '25, we thought it was responsible and prudent to get ahead of this risk and to reduce our investments into the company just in case we end up at the low end of things,” the CEO said.