A Double Dose of Growth
As deputy general counsel, Shaun Ryan (’01) helped Massachusetts-based Moderna quickly grow from an early-stage biotech firm to a manufacturer of millions of doses of COVID vaccines.

Photo by Mufid Majnun via Unsplash
A Double Dose of Growth
As deputy general counsel, Shaun Ryan (’01) helped Massachusetts-based Moderna quickly grow from an early-stage biotech firm to a manufacturer of millions of doses of COVID vaccines.
When Shaun Ryan joined the small biotech firm Moderna in 2014, he wasn’t trying to make an impact on global health. He liked the company’s culture (fast-paced and ambitious, but not overly serious) and thought working there would provide interesting legal challenges. He never imagined his work would contribute to saving millions of lives and dampening a raging pandemic.

Ryan (’01), senior vice president and deputy general counsel for Moderna, is quick to acknowledge that its scientists deserve the credit for rapidly developing a vaccine that has protected millions of people from the worst effects of COVID-19. He is proud, however, to have used his legal skills to support and advance their work.
“I feel fortunate,” he says, “to have been in the right place at the right time to be able to pitch in.”
As Moderna—a company based in Cambridge, Mass., that’s focused on harnessing messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) to create new medicines—raced to develop, make, and distribute its COVID vaccine, Ryan helped shepherd the company’s ultrafast growth.
“There was so much compressed into two years” he says of the process of expanding Moderna from a small, early-stage company with no marketable products to a pharmaceutical manufacturer with 2,700 employees and billions of dollars in revenue. “I certainly wouldn’t want to do it again, but it was a unique situation that provided a wealth of opportunities to learn.”
Ryan first encountered Moderna in 2012 as an attorney at the Boston firm Goodwin Procter, where he’d developed a niche working on business development transactions—primarily collaborations between small biotechs and large pharmaceutical companies. While working with Moderna as a client, he developed a rapport with the company’s top executives and began to share their excitement about the possibilities of mRNA technology.
Thinking Moderna would be “a cool place to work,” he joined the company, which then had about 50 employees and only one other lawyer on staff. He enjoyed tackling the wide variety of tasks that crossed his desk—from negotiating contracts with vendors of chemical reagents and structuring collaborations with university researchers to handling personnel matters and property leases.
When a novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, began spreading in late 2019, Moderna scientists had already done some clinical studies and were confident their mRNA technology could work as a vaccine. Additionally, they’d been collaborating with the National Institutes of Health on general coronavirus research for a number of years. Moderna executives quickly realized they had a solid chance of creating an effective vaccine against the new virus—and at unprecedented speed.
My focus was planning for success, and doing it in a way that we’d be able to manufacture and distribute this vaccine at scale if it was successful but, at the same time, not bankrupting the company in the event that it wasn’t successful.
“At that point, though,” says Ryan, “we had no large-scale manufacturing operations. We were only purchasing relatively small quantities of raw materials from vendors to make clinical-size batches. We weren’t planning on having a commercial product for several years.”
So the company leapt forward, completing four or five years’ worth of growth in a matter of months. Building out a commercial company in such a short period of time involved substantial risk—especially since that growth was predicated on selling a medical product that had yet to be tested or approved.
“My focus was planning for success,” says Ryan, “and doing it in a way that we’d be able to manufacture and distribute this vaccine at scale if it was successful but, at the same time, not bankrupting the company in the event that it wasn’t successful.”
Ryan’s tasks included negotiating contracts with governments and supply chain partners. Such negotiations often take several months. He didn’t have that kind of time.
“The COVID deaths were being published on a daily basis,” he says. “So you could see, tangibly, every time you picked up the newspaper, what the consequences were for every day that you were delayed.”
In typical contract negotiations, Ryan says, he examines “dozens and dozens” of issues to ensure he’s properly mitigated risks. To speed negotiations during the pandemic, he accepted that he wouldn’t be able to solve for every issue and instead focused on the handful of elements most critical to each contract’s success. His negotiating partners shared his sense of urgency.
“It was encouraging to see, when it really mattered, how collaborative and cooperative people would be,” he says. “It was a lot easier to converge on issues when there was something tangible at stake.”
Now that Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine has been successfully administered to millions of people (including, of course, to Ryan himself), Ryan can shift some of his attention to other priorities. While COVID-related business once occupied 90 percent of his time, it’s now about half of his workload. Moderna continues to broaden distribution of its existing vaccine and is developing new COVID boosters, including a combination COVID/flu shot. At the same time, company scientists are channeling Moderna’s new revenues into potential therapies for cancer, autoimmune disorders, and rare diseases that currently have few treatment options.
Moderna’s legal team now includes more than 20 lawyers, many with specific expertise in intellectual property, government regulation, and clinical operations. Ryan maintains his focus on third-party collaborations—and remains the catch-all attorney who handles issues that don’t fall neatly into anyone else’s bucket.
Regardless of what he’s working on, Ryan says he draws on the fundamental skills he learned at BU Law: reading carefully, thinking critically, making cogent arguments, and finding simple ways to explain complicated concepts. “Those are the skills,” he says, “that any good lawyer should have.”