As Covid-19 began to unfold throughout China in early 2020, Noubar Afeyan, chair of Moderna, acquired a phone name. It was his chief government telling him that senior public well being officers had requested if the biotech’s experimental vaccine supply expertise may assist battle the virus.
The request got here at a clumsy time for the decade-old pharmaceutical and biotechnology firm, which solely days earlier than had outlined to buyers its meant work programme specializing in plenty of different medication. It nonetheless had no accepted merchandise or significant revenues — $8.4mn for the three months to March 31, 2020, half that for a similar interval the earlier 12 months. Diverting assets in direction of a virus that was not but thought-about a world menace was a calculated threat. However the prospect intrigued Afeyan and his CEO Stéphane Bancel. They agreed on the decision that they’d be a part of what grew to become a world race to develop a Covid vaccine.
“We didn’t know Covid was going to be a giant deal however we knew our mRNA platform was uniquely tailor-made for very speedy execution,” says Afeyan. The cellphone name “was an intense dialogue”.
Moderna’s pivot to sort out Covid paid off. Inside 11 months it had developed and manufactured a vaccine known as Spikevax, which saved tens of millions of lives, helped the world emerge from lockdown and remodeled the US firm right into a $60bn biopharma group.
This success, and comparable efforts by German rival BioNTech and Pfizer, proved the potential of messenger RNA — a genetic materials that transports messages from our DNA to protein-making cells inside the physique — to ship vaccines. Moderna is now creating dozens of others, concentrating on diseases from HIV to most cancers.
The breakthrough made Afeyan a billionaire and inspired the 59-year-old entrepreneur to scale up Flagship Pioneering — a singular biotech incubator that invents, funds and develops its personal expertise.
Based in 1999 by Afeyan, Flagship has helped launch greater than 70 firms. Some buyers imagine it’s revolutionising the entrepreneurial course of in biotech, linking basic analysis with enterprise experience and funding. Moderna is probably the most well-known Flagship success however Afeyan has based dozens of firms. Twelve of Flagship’s present crop of 41 are publicly listed, together with Denali Therapeutics, a biotech creating medication to deal with neurodegenerative illnesses akin to Parkinson’s.
Afeyan says Flagship focuses on many alternative concepts directly slightly than a single challenge, in an identical technique to enterprise capital buyers. To attain this, Afeyan and Flagship’s group of 300 scientists, bankers, executives and different employees start the method by asking a collection of “what if” questions associated to fundamental science. After they strike on an thought that would change into a viable enterprise they safe mental property rights — final 12 months Flagship filed 400-plus patents — and make investments between $1mn to $2mn to show the enterprise mannequin earlier than establishing an organization.
Indigo Agriculture, for instance, which is creating expertise to spice up crop yields and profitability, began as a easy speculation that placing microbes on crops may have an effect on their well being, says Afeyan. Many Flagship start-ups don’t progress earlier than they’re killed by the group in a “Darwinian evolutionary course of” to pick winners, he says. However the firms that survive can draw on the pool of capital amassed following a $3.4bn fundraising in June 2021.
Afeyan says this centralised fundraising allows Flagship to retain management of portfolio firms and it sometimes owns between 50-60 per cent of shares after they go public. This monetary firepower can maintain firms throughout cyclical downturns — at present Nasdaq’s biotech index is down 27 per cent over the previous 12 months, precipitated by the rise in rates of interest pushing speculative buyers out of the sector.
Throughout a tour of Flagship’s places of work in Cambridge, Massachusetts — not removed from MIT, the place he earned a PhD in biochemical engineering in 1987 — Afeyan says a key a part of Flagship’s success will be attributed to its distinctive tradition, which focuses across the group slightly than the person.
“Entrepreneurship is usually about hero-making slightly than the glorification of the method . . . However you may have a better probability of success, can obtain issues sooner and by spending much less cash as an organisation, slightly than as a bunch of people doing heroic issues,” he says.
CEO Bancel, who Afeyan persuaded to hitch Moderna as chief government a decade in the past, describes his chair as a “renaissance man”: a “distinctive mix” of scientist, businessman and entrepreneur. “Most individuals consider Noubar as a enterprise capitalist however firstly he’s an entrepreneur.”
Afeyan says his Armenian heritage, rising up as a boy in war-torn Beirut, and immigrant standing within the US — the place he got here to reside in 1983 and obtained citizenship in 2008 — honed his entrepreneurial spirit. His nice aunt was some of the vital influences in his life. “[She] lived by way of the [Armenian] genocide and her brothers [one of whom is Afeyan’s paternal grandfather] had been taken away to be killed, not as soon as however twice . . . The explanation I’m right here is that they escaped that second time,” says Afeyan. “These experiences motivated me to dare to go to the sides of stuff.”
He credit an opportunity assembly with David Packard, the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, within the mid-Eighties for uplifting him to arrange an organization making devices for the biotech business. Just a few years later Afeyan based PerSeptive Biosystems, which he bought for $360mn in 1997, offering the capital to discovered what’s now Flagship.
Afeyan describes steering Moderna’s board throughout the race to develop a Covid vaccine as a succession of “massive challenges”. Nonetheless, the science of mRNA, which is the facet most individuals get enthusiastic about, just isn’t, he says, within the high three challenges due to the last decade of analysis performed by the corporate’s scientists.
Establishing and working scientific trials of 30,000 individuals in lightning-fast time was a far higher take a look at. The corporate had by no means performed a trial with greater than a few hundred topics, he says. The opposite challenges had been producing greater than 1bn doses of the vaccine if you haven’t made quite a lot of thousand earlier than, and making certain that different work programmes weren’t shut down.
“There may be the difficulty of the way you govern with that degree of uncertainty and when making choices entails a whole lot of tens of millions of {dollars},” provides Afeyan.
There have additionally been different hiccups. In Could Moderna’s chief monetary officer Jorge Gomez left after simply in the future within the job, because it emerged that his former employer, dental gear producer Dentsply Sirona, was investigating former senior managers over monetary reporting.
Three questions for Noubar Afeyan
Who’s your management hero?
Lee Kuan Yew, the daddy of recent Singapore, who embodied the notion of considering future backwards versus current forwards. He needed to paint a imaginative and prescient and demand it was reachable.
If you weren’t a founder, what would you be?
I’d make films — from screenwriting proper by way of to producing. Creativeness and creativity are what gasoline me, and I really like seeing an imagined story dropped at life. I additionally love complicated tasks and fixing the issues alongside the way in which that enable them to succeed in fruition.
What was the primary management lesson you learnt?
Hiring the most effective individuals is essential, however getting the most effective out of individuals is the distinction maker at nice firms. After I first began, I used to be very targeted on intelligence, schooling and expertise, versus innate qualities like creativity, bravery, curiosity, group spirit. You want each, clearly, however inspiring individuals to steer and carry out in methods they didn’t know they had been able to results in nice groups, and large breakthroughs.
Critics imagine Moderna ought to have undertaken higher due diligence earlier than appointing Gomez. They’ve additionally prompt different current senior departures could possibly be linked to previous allegations of a “caustic” work surroundings, a declare vigorously denied by Afeyan.
“I can’t consider a special method that we may have used,” Afeyan says, when requested in regards to the appointment of Gomez. He says non-disclosure guidelines prevented Gomez or Dentsply from revealing the investigation earlier than his appointment. He says it’s incorrect to conflate the departure of Gomez with claims of a problematic work tradition, first reported by Stat, a well being information web site, in 2016, including that lots of the individuals who reported such allegations by no means believed the corporate’s vaccine would work.
“The management adjustments . . . are fully commensurate with the speedy progress and scale that Moderna has undergone throughout the pandemic, going from a comparatively unknown firm earlier than Covid, using about 700 individuals, to three,500 individuals immediately,” he says.
Moderna’s challenges aren’t over because it nonetheless should show to buyers that it might probably use its mRNA platform to develop different medication. Requested if Moderna ought to stay a one product firm? “Nonsense,” he says.
“We have now 46 programmes and happily we now have the monetary assets to prosecute all of them.
“I can’t let you know which medication in our mRNA platform are going to be accepted first . . . however I’m very assured a few of the 46 drug candidates in our pipeline might be profitable.”
As Covid-19 began to unfold throughout China in early 2020, Noubar Afeyan, chair of Moderna, acquired a phone name. It was his chief government telling him that senior public well being officers had requested if the biotech’s experimental vaccine supply expertise may assist battle the virus.
The request got here at a clumsy time for the decade-old pharmaceutical and biotechnology firm, which solely days earlier than had outlined to buyers its meant work programme specializing in plenty of different medication. It nonetheless had no accepted merchandise or significant revenues — $8.4mn for the three months to March 31, 2020, half that for a similar interval the earlier 12 months. Diverting assets in direction of a virus that was not but thought-about a world menace was a calculated threat. However the prospect intrigued Afeyan and his CEO Stéphane Bancel. They agreed on the decision that they’d be a part of what grew to become a world race to develop a Covid vaccine.
“We didn’t know Covid was going to be a giant deal however we knew our mRNA platform was uniquely tailor-made for very speedy execution,” says Afeyan. The cellphone name “was an intense dialogue”.
Moderna’s pivot to sort out Covid paid off. Inside 11 months it had developed and manufactured a vaccine known as Spikevax, which saved tens of millions of lives, helped the world emerge from lockdown and remodeled the US firm right into a $60bn biopharma group.
This success, and comparable efforts by German rival BioNTech and Pfizer, proved the potential of messenger RNA — a genetic materials that transports messages from our DNA to protein-making cells inside the physique — to ship vaccines. Moderna is now creating dozens of others, concentrating on diseases from HIV to most cancers.
The breakthrough made Afeyan a billionaire and inspired the 59-year-old entrepreneur to scale up Flagship Pioneering — a singular biotech incubator that invents, funds and develops its personal expertise.
Based in 1999 by Afeyan, Flagship has helped launch greater than 70 firms. Some buyers imagine it’s revolutionising the entrepreneurial course of in biotech, linking basic analysis with enterprise experience and funding. Moderna is probably the most well-known Flagship success however Afeyan has based dozens of firms. Twelve of Flagship’s present crop of 41 are publicly listed, together with Denali Therapeutics, a biotech creating medication to deal with neurodegenerative illnesses akin to Parkinson’s.
Afeyan says Flagship focuses on many alternative concepts directly slightly than a single challenge, in an identical technique to enterprise capital buyers. To attain this, Afeyan and Flagship’s group of 300 scientists, bankers, executives and different employees start the method by asking a collection of “what if” questions associated to fundamental science. After they strike on an thought that would change into a viable enterprise they safe mental property rights — final 12 months Flagship filed 400-plus patents — and make investments between $1mn to $2mn to show the enterprise mannequin earlier than establishing an organization.
Indigo Agriculture, for instance, which is creating expertise to spice up crop yields and profitability, began as a easy speculation that placing microbes on crops may have an effect on their well being, says Afeyan. Many Flagship start-ups don’t progress earlier than they’re killed by the group in a “Darwinian evolutionary course of” to pick winners, he says. However the firms that survive can draw on the pool of capital amassed following a $3.4bn fundraising in June 2021.
Afeyan says this centralised fundraising allows Flagship to retain management of portfolio firms and it sometimes owns between 50-60 per cent of shares after they go public. This monetary firepower can maintain firms throughout cyclical downturns — at present Nasdaq’s biotech index is down 27 per cent over the previous 12 months, precipitated by the rise in rates of interest pushing speculative buyers out of the sector.
Throughout a tour of Flagship’s places of work in Cambridge, Massachusetts — not removed from MIT, the place he earned a PhD in biochemical engineering in 1987 — Afeyan says a key a part of Flagship’s success will be attributed to its distinctive tradition, which focuses across the group slightly than the person.
“Entrepreneurship is usually about hero-making slightly than the glorification of the method . . . However you may have a better probability of success, can obtain issues sooner and by spending much less cash as an organisation, slightly than as a bunch of people doing heroic issues,” he says.
CEO Bancel, who Afeyan persuaded to hitch Moderna as chief government a decade in the past, describes his chair as a “renaissance man”: a “distinctive mix” of scientist, businessman and entrepreneur. “Most individuals consider Noubar as a enterprise capitalist however firstly he’s an entrepreneur.”
Afeyan says his Armenian heritage, rising up as a boy in war-torn Beirut, and immigrant standing within the US — the place he got here to reside in 1983 and obtained citizenship in 2008 — honed his entrepreneurial spirit. His nice aunt was some of the vital influences in his life. “[She] lived by way of the [Armenian] genocide and her brothers [one of whom is Afeyan’s paternal grandfather] had been taken away to be killed, not as soon as however twice . . . The explanation I’m right here is that they escaped that second time,” says Afeyan. “These experiences motivated me to dare to go to the sides of stuff.”
He credit an opportunity assembly with David Packard, the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, within the mid-Eighties for uplifting him to arrange an organization making devices for the biotech business. Just a few years later Afeyan based PerSeptive Biosystems, which he bought for $360mn in 1997, offering the capital to discovered what’s now Flagship.
Afeyan describes steering Moderna’s board throughout the race to develop a Covid vaccine as a succession of “massive challenges”. Nonetheless, the science of mRNA, which is the facet most individuals get enthusiastic about, just isn’t, he says, within the high three challenges due to the last decade of analysis performed by the corporate’s scientists.
Establishing and working scientific trials of 30,000 individuals in lightning-fast time was a far higher take a look at. The corporate had by no means performed a trial with greater than a few hundred topics, he says. The opposite challenges had been producing greater than 1bn doses of the vaccine if you haven’t made quite a lot of thousand earlier than, and making certain that different work programmes weren’t shut down.
“There may be the difficulty of the way you govern with that degree of uncertainty and when making choices entails a whole lot of tens of millions of {dollars},” provides Afeyan.
There have additionally been different hiccups. In Could Moderna’s chief monetary officer Jorge Gomez left after simply in the future within the job, because it emerged that his former employer, dental gear producer Dentsply Sirona, was investigating former senior managers over monetary reporting.
Three questions for Noubar Afeyan
Who’s your management hero?
Lee Kuan Yew, the daddy of recent Singapore, who embodied the notion of considering future backwards versus current forwards. He needed to paint a imaginative and prescient and demand it was reachable.
If you weren’t a founder, what would you be?
I’d make films — from screenwriting proper by way of to producing. Creativeness and creativity are what gasoline me, and I really like seeing an imagined story dropped at life. I additionally love complicated tasks and fixing the issues alongside the way in which that enable them to succeed in fruition.
What was the primary management lesson you learnt?
Hiring the most effective individuals is essential, however getting the most effective out of individuals is the distinction maker at nice firms. After I first began, I used to be very targeted on intelligence, schooling and expertise, versus innate qualities like creativity, bravery, curiosity, group spirit. You want each, clearly, however inspiring individuals to steer and carry out in methods they didn’t know they had been able to results in nice groups, and large breakthroughs.
Critics imagine Moderna ought to have undertaken higher due diligence earlier than appointing Gomez. They’ve additionally prompt different current senior departures could possibly be linked to previous allegations of a “caustic” work surroundings, a declare vigorously denied by Afeyan.
“I can’t consider a special method that we may have used,” Afeyan says, when requested in regards to the appointment of Gomez. He says non-disclosure guidelines prevented Gomez or Dentsply from revealing the investigation earlier than his appointment. He says it’s incorrect to conflate the departure of Gomez with claims of a problematic work tradition, first reported by Stat, a well being information web site, in 2016, including that lots of the individuals who reported such allegations by no means believed the corporate’s vaccine would work.
“The management adjustments . . . are fully commensurate with the speedy progress and scale that Moderna has undergone throughout the pandemic, going from a comparatively unknown firm earlier than Covid, using about 700 individuals, to three,500 individuals immediately,” he says.
Moderna’s challenges aren’t over because it nonetheless should show to buyers that it might probably use its mRNA platform to develop different medication. Requested if Moderna ought to stay a one product firm? “Nonsense,” he says.
“We have now 46 programmes and happily we now have the monetary assets to prosecute all of them.
“I can’t let you know which medication in our mRNA platform are going to be accepted first . . . however I’m very assured a few of the 46 drug candidates in our pipeline might be profitable.”
