Insight
Afeyan: The romantic 'hero founder' startup folklore is largely unnecessary
“There's a lot of folklore in the startup world, which I'd say emphasizes the role of the individual. There's a hero kind of notion that's created, you know, against all odds. And here we were claiming that conceiving, creating, growing companies could be the o…”
Insight
Afeyan: Precision in guessing what works is unimportant when pioneering new fields
“The accuracy with which you have to guess what's going to work Is not at all important. Because we get into these brand new areas, it's wide open to find where value lies, right? Imagine if we waited three, four years as people did, or 10 years in the case of …”
Insight
Afeyan: Long biotech lifecycles prevent serial entrepreneurship, forcing internal talent creation
“In biotech, these companies have a half-life or a life cycle of, say, 10 years, 15 years. So people don't do one company after another. If they do one company after 1015 years and they succeed, they stop doing it. So you have to create the talent.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Afeyan: Nobody took mRNA research seriously as recently as 2016
“Five years ago, nobody was taking MRNA research seriously”
Assertion Supported
Afeyan: 2,000 people received Moderna mRNA before COVID-19 trials
“Before a single vaccine for coronavirus that we tested, we had already 2000 people Who had received mRNA from us.”
Assertion Supported
Afeyan: Moderna designed the mRNA-1273 vaccine sequence in two days
“And to the time when we had the computer-generated sequence of the RNA, that is essentially today mRNA-twelve-seventy-three, was two days.”
Disclosure
Afeyan: Moderna released early vaccine data to satisfy public disclosure obligations
“Well, we indeed, in May, we indeed did come out and say at a very high level that we had some encouraging results, and people attacked us every which way for having said that, because they basically said, well, that's doing science by press release and many ot…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Afeyan: Early immune interventions may shield against flu, coronavirus, and HIV
“Because I think that we're learning enough about the immune system that if we intervene early enough and broadly enough, we may well create a shield, a protective shield against these hyper variable viruses like influenza, like Corona, like rhinovirus that cau…”
Disclosure
Afeyan: Replaced himself as CEO the day after closing $1 million
“So what I decided to do is I kept talking to people until I found a firm to invest with me as the initial CEO, which is what I had been for the whole time, the year and a half before. And the day after we closed the million dollars, I went to them and I said, …”
Assertion Supported
Afeyan: Celera sequenced the genome because the government project was too slow
“We needed to sequence the genome first, and we at first thought maybe the government can, the government's effort at the time would suffice, but it was going fairly slowly, and so we launched a, what It became a competitive effort, although it wasn't fully int…”
Assertion Partly supported
Afeyan: Moderna tested 9-10 vaccines and spent $2B pre-COVID
“We had tested nine, maybe even 10 different human vaccines in every single case showing neutralizing antibodies, and we had also another nine programs that were going after human therapeutics, so it was a fairly broad platform that had already been developed. …”
Assertion Supported
Afeyan: The NIH, not Moderna, conducted early COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials
“We didn't do the clinical work. They did.”
Assertion Partly supported
Afeyan: Moderna scaled from 1,000 to one billion doses in one year
“We could make, you know, a billion doses the first year of production, up from probably making, you know, a thousand doses the year before of anything.”
Insight
Afeyan: Founders cannot raise biotech capital without specifying concrete technology
“The very first business plan I ended up writing to try to claim that we were going to do this didn't specify technology. It literally just said, we're going to develop instruments that kind of address needs in the biotechnology field, and I quickly learned tha…”
Disclosure
Afeyan: Celera Genomics was initially conceived as a biological Bloomberg Terminal
“Ultimately, the thing we decided to do was to become a content delivery company modeled after Bloomberg with the Bloomberg terminals, as you may remember. So Bloomberg takes public information, at least dated back then, annotates it, interconnects it, adds som…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Afeyan: Flagship started four platform projects alongside Moderna's foundation
“In the exact same year that we Did the foundation laying for what became Moderna. We also started four other projects that were each platforms in their own right, going after different aspects of biomedical opportunity space, each with as big a leap, each with…”
Noubar Afeyan