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Pandemic tech grows up

Six years after COVID-19 emerged, technologies built for the pandemic are being repurposed for cancer treatment, home testing, and more

NELSON ALMEIDA/AFP via Getty Images

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Six years after COVID-19 arrived, much of the technology associated with the pandemic seems to have vanished. Temperature scanners sit unplugged. Exposure-notification apps have been deleted. QR-code menus survive, but mostly because restaurants discovered that reprinting menus costs money.

Much of the pandemic’s first wave of technology deserved to disappear. But COVID also created factories, regulatory pathways, scientific expertise, and new consumer habits. Now, and probably for the foreseeable future, those investments are finding markets well beyond the disease that paid for them.

Messenger RNA was under development for decades before COVID. The pandemic proved that it could be manufactured, authorized, and distributed at enormous scale. The equipment and expertise assembled for that effort are now being put to other work.

The latest evidence came last month from Moderna $MRNA 5.38% and Merck $MRK -0.54%. Their personalized mRNA treatment for melanoma succeeded in a late-stage trial of 1,137 patients. The........

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