It was an extraordinary achievement. In less than one year, the biomedical ecosystem helped bring to life an mRNA vaccine with the power to stave off severe disease and death during the worst pandemic since 1918. Of course, this wasn’t really a miracle. It was just one example of what government and partners can do when challenged to develop disruptive innovations.
Government has been a disruptive force for innovation across many sectors, from Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) laying the foundation for the internet in the 1960s, to the role of the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) and US Department of Energy in the Human Genome Project, which mapped the full genome for the first time in 2003 with an international consortium of thousands of researchers, to the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief initiative that has saved more than 25 million lives from HIV/AIDS across the globe.