The scientist who fled Cuba and became one of the key pieces of the Moderna vaccine for covid | Society

In 2007, Noelia Álvarez was 82 years old and she was the only person who knew that her grandson would never return from that trip to Calgary (Canada). Rolando Pajón was born in Havana just half a century ago and has not set foot in it for 15 years. It is the price paid by those who escape the Cuban regime. He did it taking advantage of a project in Canada and ended up being one of the scientists involved in the first line in the development of the Moderna’s coronavirus vaccine.

Pajón has just been appointed medical director of the company for Latin America. He still does not know if he will move to a country in the South or if he will stay in Boston, the place where he ended up settling after passing through California, and where he has started a family with another Cuban woman who left the island years before him.

—What would someone who has developed a vaccine say to you? all those people who mistrustWhat do you think that vaccines are just a business or that they have not been sufficiently tested?

—There is a human dimension that is often overlooked. Our relatives, friends, acquaintances and ourselves were going to be vaccinated [su propia esposa la recibió]. At what point was one of us going to develop a vaccine that he wouldn’t be willing to put in his family? Because when we work we think about saving humanity, yes, but also that we are going to save our father or our grandmother.

Pajón did not get to witness the discovery of the vaccine. Noelia passed away in 2015. The Cuban is moved by her when he remembers her: “She was my number one fan.” Pajón grew up with her and her grandfather, who died a few years earlier, in Bauta, on the outskirts of the capital. It was a “very, very, very, very modest” family. She went through a system of schools for talented children and ended up leading a research team at the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in Cuba, one of the most important in the Latin American region.

He had always been interested in vaccines. Before leaving, he worked on a meningococcus disease and, in his spare time, he wrote popular science children’s books with which he has won several awards in his country: Alexander and the Mutants, Alejandro and the vaccines, Alexander and the bacteria.

“We had an assay in hand that we could not develop in Cuba because we needed a specific reagent that was not easy to obtain. I established a collaboration with a scientist from the University of Calgary for precisely that. I tried to get a member of my team to travel to do that job, but none of them were given permission. So I had to go.”

When he took the plane he had already decided that he would not return. He only she told Noelia. He did not tell her ex-wife at the time or the two daughters he left in her country, who were only four and one and a half years old at the time. “It is a very strong decision. I didn’t know if I would have time to see my grandmother again, now older, and I assumed that many years would pass without being able to hug my girls, because the government does not allow the family to travel or one to return; she considers him a traitor. But I knew that my future was not in a country like Cuba”, she narrates.

He did the experiments he had traveled for, sent the results back home, and stayed in Calgary, where he spent two years “working non-stop.” His obsession was to do something useful. “There are a lot of researchers in this field who never see his work turn into a vaccine,” he says. He wanted to do something more than work with rodents: “We are very good at making vaccines for mice. And curing their cancer, but I was looking for a real impact.” Together with a colleague, he began to study new vaccine candidates against human respiratory pathogens, taking them out of the phase of experiments with mice and taking them to proof of concept in humans.

There was still more than a decade left for covid to come into our lives. But those were decisive steps for Pajón to end up being one of the protagonists of one of the most effective vaccines against SARS-CoV-2. He signed with Moderna in 2018 to work on flu immunizations using revolutionary messenger RNA technology and, in less than two years, the pandemic blew everything up.

This is how he explains his role in the Moderna vaccine: “I was the leader of the team that developed all the tests and all the laboratory tests that measure the immune response and the safety of the vaccine.” In the phase 3 trial, the one prior to approval, Pajón’s task was to check that everything was going well with the more than 30,000 individuals who participated in the study: “Organize the samples, do the analyses, generate the data, check that the antibodies in our vaccine neutralize the virus in such a large population. All of this is a very complex system, with the participation of a very large team. And I was leading that team.”

“When do they realize they have something very promising?”

—In March 2020, when we started the phase 1 clinical study, with a limited number of participants, our objective was to verify that the vaccine was safe, that it did not produce significant adverse reactions. Obviously, as time goes on, we also take the opportunity to measure the immune response against the virus. A couple of months later, like in May or June, very late at night, we met with our colleagues to study this data. It was one of the most hopeful days of the process because we saw that the antibodies were capable of neutralizing the coronavirus.

They still spent months to confirm this data. Phase 2 and 3 were missing, which verifies with thousands of people that what works in the laboratory also works in real life. They submitted their data to US health authorities in November 2020.

“Did you fear at that time that your conclusions would be rejected?”

—No. The data we had was very, very consistent. We knew that the vaccine limited infection to 95% efficacy at that time. It was a super exciting moment, one of the happiest days of my life. But it was also a difficult day.

-Why?

—Because we knew that our vaccine worked, but also that we didn’t have enough for everyone.

Almost a year and a half has passed since that day and there are still more than 2.8 billion people who have not received a single puncture. Many, because they have rejected it. But most of them because a sufficient amount of medicine has not yet reached their countries. Today, one of its tasks is to bring this technology to Latin American countries that still have unvaccinated populations, in addition to establishing Moderna in the region and making messenger RNA technology accessible to doctors and laboratories.

Pajón now thinks of Noelia. She would have been proud. Although she did not see the peak of her grandson’s career, she was able to meet again. Her grandmother’s father was Asturian: he arrived in Cuba as a boy in 1914. In 2010 she obtained Spanish nationality, so she was able to leave the island on a couple of occasions to meet her grandson. So could Pajón’s daughters, whom she saw six and a half years after escaping from Cuba.

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