Moderna
Building AI-Driven Research & Technical Development for Tomorrow
Moderna’s mission is clear: to deliver the greatest possible impact to people through mRNA medicines. In pursuing that mission, the Company has doubled down on what matters most: technology, innovation, and quality. With advances in AI offering extraordinary opportunities, Moderna recognized that to fully leverage these, its teams needed new ways of working–ones built upon structured data, scalable and secure infrastructure, and unified tools.
The Challenges
Collaboration Across Teams and Sites: With hundreds of scientists working across infectious diseases, cancer, and rare diseases, Moderna saw an opportunity to better connect data and people. Instead of research groups working in silos, the Company wanted a shared platform where experiment lineage was clear, feedback could flow across teams, and insights could travel globally.
Scalability of Software Capabilities: Keeping up with requests to implement new features and capabilities that included new methods, assays or emerging modalities while having time to address technical debt became a resource challenged constraint.
AI Readiness Barriers: AI and machine learning promise powerful insights - detecting subtle signals, surfacing trends across massive datasets, aiding predictive processes - but these capabilities demand certain preconditions: data that is well annotated, comprehensively captured in structured formats, consistently named/schematized, and centrally accessible. Without those, AI tools are limited by inconsistency, poor traceability, and data “noise.”
The Solution: Benchling as the Digital Core
To meet these challenges, Moderna expanded its collaboration with Benchling to deploy a unified AI-ready platform across its research organization. Key elements include:
Unified Platform Rollout: What began in technical development (analytical development, process development, formulations) has now broadened to hundreds of research scientists company-wide. Benchling provides a single system where scientists can design experiments, track samples, annotate data, and analyze results.
Structured, Flexible Data Capture: With Benchling, Moderna standardizes naming schemes, schema/ontology, templates, and workflows - but retains flexibility. When novel methods or new experimental types emerge, Moderna can spin up new schemas and capture new data types quickly, while preserving core parameters needed for downstream pipelines.
Automation, Workflow & Developer Tools: Using Benchling’s developer platform, Moderna builds custom workflows, automates template generation, and integrates proprietary machine learning models. This reduces setup time and allows scientists and engineers to innovate rather than maintain legacy tools.
Bridging Science & Computation: Benchling acts as a central, user-friendly platform that is also rich enough for bioinformatics pipelines to pull structured data out, allowing trends, ML/LLM models, and analytics to feed off real experiment data.
How It’s Working Today
Several concrete benefits and outcomes have emerged:
Faster & Better Data Sharing: Data is more robustly captured (in terms of detail), more flexibly captured (able to adapt to new types of experiments), and more easily shared across sites.
Reduced Silos & Improved Collaboration: The lineage of experiments is now visible. Groups that used to work in isolation, or with manually assembled summary slides and separate files, can now see upstream and downstream dependencies in real time, enabling feedback loops and shared decision making.
Consistency & Standardization: Strict naming schemes and schema control prevent errors that would break pipelines. Where deviations or new experiments arise, they are managed via new templates and schemas that preserve structure while allowing innovation.
Ensuring Confidence Through Traceability: In Moderna’s environment, every experiment and dataset contributes to critical decisions. The opportunity wasn’t simply to meet compliance standards but to strengthen confidence, reproducibility, and efficiency by having a clear lineage of every material and process. With Benchling, audit trails and structured records are automatically captured, so scientists can quickly see what was done, when, and by whom, and then build on that work with greater confidence.
AI & ML-Ready Foundations: Looking ahead, Moderna is now generating large volumes of well-annotated, structured data, centrally stored. This enables:
Machine Learning: To look for subtle differences in process or assay data, spot anomalies, predict likely outcomes.
Large Language Models / Agent-Style Tools: To scan across datasets, surface patterns humans wouldn’t detect, help scientists ask new questions, and speed insight.
Moderna’s Forward-Looking Aims
Looking ahead, Moderna is positioning itself to:
Exploit Trends Across the Entire Research Portfolio: With unified structured data, they can detect patterns not just within a single project, but across therapeutic areas.
Accelerate Time to Discovery & Translation: By removing friction in experiment setup, data recording, and feedback loops, they aim to go from hypothesis → experiment → insight much more quickly.
Unlock AI-Driven Innovation: As data accumulates, the value of AI & ML tools grows. From improved process optimization to novel target discovery, from predictive modelling to trend detection, Moderna is laying the groundwork.
Maintain Flexibility as Science Evolves: New modalities, novel assay types, unexpected biological systems - Moderna requires a digital platform that can adapt without breaking. Benchling’s approach to schemas, templates, and versionable workflows supports that.
Why This Matters: Impact on Patients & Science
More Rapid Innovation: By smoothing internal processes and enabling AI-guided decision-making, potential therapies could progress more efficiently from idea to clinic.
Higher Confidence & Quality: Robust traceability, audit trails, and secure structured data reduce errors, improve reproducibility, and support regulatory readiness.
Scale & Efficiency: Instead of building and maintaining many custom tools internally, resources can be redirected to discovery, novel science, therapeutic innovation, and focused engineering efforts that are truly unique to Moderna.
