Noubar Afeyan, co-founder of Moderna, explains why the company had strong clinical conviction in its mRNA platform heading into the COVID-19 pandemic.
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: 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…”