Stéphane Bancel

Current Company

Moderna — CEO

From Startup CEO to Household Name

Stéphane Bancel joined Moderna as CEO in 2011 when the company was a small, unprofitable research venture with an unproven technology. Born in Marseille, France, Stéphane Bancel holds a master’s in chemical engineering and an MBA from Harvard. Before Moderna, he served as CEO of BioMérieux, a French diagnostics company. Stéphane Bancel bet his career on mRNA technology — the idea that you could instruct human cells to produce their own therapeutic proteins — at a time when most of the scientific establishment considered the approach impractical.

The COVID-19 pandemic validated that bet in the most dramatic way possible. Under Stéphane Bancel’s leadership, Moderna developed one of the first authorized COVID-19 vaccines in less than a year, transforming the company from a pre-revenue biotech into a major pharmaceutical player with tens of billions in vaccine revenue. Stéphane Bancel’s challenge now is proving that mRNA is a platform — that the same technology can work across cancer vaccines, rare diseases, and other infectious diseases — and that Moderna’s pandemic success was the beginning of the story, not the whole story.