Until last year, pharma company Moderna seemed to be a toxic investment story you read about only if you thumbed through the business pages of your newspaper.

It had been around for a decade without managing to get a single drug approved, it had lost about $2 billion and it was only sustained through the life-support of repeated capital raising.   

Its survival was pinned on its research into vaccine technology, specifically mRNA-based vaccines, which weren’t known much beyond the research community.   

Then a virus called SARS-CoV-2 was identified outside the city of Wuhan and changed everything.