Being publicly traded and with a market cap of about $70 billion as of this writing, Moderna is emphatically not an academic institution. While it may seem cynical to say given the extraordinary contribution its mRNA COVID-19 vaccines have made to global public health, its job as a corporation is to provide its shareholders acceptable return on investment. Since the Cambridge, Mass.-based biotech firm went public four years ago, it has succeeded on that front: The company is worth roughly 10 times its offering price.
