MIAMI, United States.- Cuban scientist Rolando Pajón has just been appointed medical director of Moderna in Latin America and this week he told the Spanish newspaper in an interview The country the story of how he fled Cuba, and his role in one of the safest coronavirus vaccines.
Pajón left Cuba 15 years ago as part of a Cuban scientific delegation that attended a project in Calgary, Canada. Since then he has not returned. “It’s the price paid by those who escape the Cuban regime,” he says.
“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 at 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, “he said.
Leave Cuba
When he got on the plane, he knew that he would not return, and that he would spend many years without seeing his daughters and his grandmother, then 82 years old and his “number one fan,” he said.
“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; considers him a traitor. But I knew that my future was not in a country like Cuba”, he sentenced.
Pajón grew up with his grandparents in Bauta, on the outskirts of Havana. It was a “very, very, very, very modest” family, he says, and as a child he went through a system of schools for gifted children. He later ended up leading a research team at the Cuban Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology. He from there to Calgary, from where he did not return.
The scientist explained that in Canada he did the experiments for which he had traveled, sent the results to his country and stayed. He spent two years “working non-stop”, since his obsession was to do something useful.
“There are a lot of researchers in this field who never see their work turn into a vaccine,” and he wanted to do more than just work with rodents. “We are very good at making vaccines for mice. And curing their cancer, but I was looking for a real impact.”
A Cuban in the Moderna vaccine
More than a decade later, when the coronavirus broke out in 2020, Pajón had already been working at Moderna since 2018. He was working on flu immunizations that used revolutionary messenger RNA technology. That’s where he started the coronavirus.
“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.” 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, verify that the antibodies of our vaccine neutralize the virus in a population as big. All of this is a very complex system, with the participation of a very large team. And I was leading that team.”
Pajón currently lives in Boston, and she just thinks that her grandmother would have been proud of her work and where she is today.
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