[5] Flagship Pioneering focuses on creating and investing in first-in-category, high-value life science companies in three principal business sectors: therapeutics, health technologies and sustainability. I think of it as chess. Noubar Afeyan is founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering. We have a history of emerging from major global crises with new global paradigms, and new institutions to support them. In biotech and VC, people were saying, the era of biotech is over, the era of the platform is over. What do I mean by that? The trial, which will be conducted at U.S. clinical research sites,is expected to enroll approximately 30,000 adult volunteers who do not have COVID-19., Noubar Ayefan has voiced support for ways to increase the number of immigrant entrepreneurs in America. We have learned that none of that has worked, recalls Doug Cole, a medical doctor and Flagships managing partner who joined Afeyan as one of the first employees in 2001. Updated. Perhaps a second question for all of us in and beyond biotech to take into 2022 is: What Now? When fast-moving biotech platform companies fueled by private capital go public, they often run headlong into this brick wall of bias, effectively discouraging this more impactful form of innovation and the diversified product portfolios that result. Take, for example, the burgeoning applications of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to biology. In January, scientists at Moderna and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) identified the sequence for a key protein on the surface of the virus called the spike protein. But already, at this stage, we can see the ways in which the pandemic has revealed the future of biotechnology, an industry I have contributed to and watched evolve over the past 35 years. [7] The company's annual revenues grew to $100 million and in 1998 was acquired by PerkinElmer/Applera and became CBO of Applera. He is also co-founder and Board Chairman of Moderna. What Now? Afeyan is of Armenian heritage and was born in Beirut, Lebanon. Minimum Fortune To Make the Cut Reaches A Record-Breaking $2.9 Billion And The Collective Net Worth Of The 2021 List Makers Surges To A Historic $4.5 Trillion #Forbes400 NEW YORK October 5, 20201 Forbes today released its 40th annual Forbes 400 list, the definitive ranking of the wealthiest p Shares of the Massachusetts-based biotech firm have risen by nearly 29% over the past month, pushing the net worth of the companys president, Stephen Hoge, to $1.1 billion. An investor today will believe the vaccine. You cannot procrastinate over the particular move. Weve always believed that multiproduct bioplatform companies are most likely to create exponential potential. [16] Afeyan has authored numerous scientific publications[17] and patents. As journalists and others work to capture the history of how mRNA vaccines were developed and deployed, there is one question I get over and over again as the co-founder and chairman of Moderna: Were you stunned that your vaccine worked? The vaccine is part of Modernas evolution to a clinical stage company. It is also building out a new division focused on preemptive medicine, a more personalized, predictive type of preventive health care, as well as health security to better prepare for future threats from infectious diseases. Noubar has always fundamentally believed that you can change the world with platform science, says Evelos Gill. In 2000, Afeyan founded Flagship Pioneering to create and fund early-stage start-ups addressing unmet needs in healthcare and sustainability. Speaking with KTLA about the latest developments at Moderna, Afeyan highlighted how his journey as an immigrant has impacted his work. While we read official numbers like 5.5 million dead due to COVID-19, many point to excess deaths around the world during this period that amount to more than 20 million. Born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1962 to Armenian parents, he and his family fled the Lebanese Civil War to move to Montreal in 1975. Flagship Pioneering Fellowship Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one. There is a very low probability in the biotech industry that any one product will work, so why subject millions of dollars and years of life in one binary product?, he says. First reported on December 12, 2019, we seem trapped in a never-ending year now in its 758th Noubar Afeyan, co-founder and board chair of Moderna, said that any push back is conflating price pressure on drugs with vaccines, which should be treated separately. Getting out, however, required the kind of adaptation and ingenuity that Afeyan applies to his businesses today. He's also the chairman and cofounder of biotech firm Moderna, known for its Covid-19 vaccine which was authorized by the U.S. FDA in December 2020. He was living a similar life to what I live now. We are now a major step closer to delivering on the promise of transformative mRNA science to bring breakthrough medicines to patients across a vast array of diseases, including infectious diseases, rare diseases, cancer and cardiovascular diseases, among others.. Noubar Afeyan (born July 25, 1962), is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, inventor, technologist, and CEO. [1] Weve entered the year with hard-earned wisdom: We know what it looks like to be a step behind a global pathogen, and what it costs. Noubar Afeyan, Co-Founder and Chairman of Moderna and Founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering, champions proactive thinking and creating the right environment for new idea generation to innovate in leaps and bounds. Noubar Afeyan (Western Armenian: ; born in 1962) is an American-Canadian entrepreneur, inventor, and philanthropist. Noubar Afeyan (born July 25, 1962), is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, inventor, technologist, and CEO. Other reports noted that Noubar Afeyan, a Moderna co-founder, has sold a chunk of his Moderna shares for $1.5 billion. Every one of our companies is born to aspire to what Moderna has done, he told Forbes during an interview at Flagships offices overlooking the Charles River. Draw a circle around what currently exists, Afeyan says, and then draw a bigger circle around whats adjacent to that. Flagship Pioneering Founder & CEO Noubar Afeyan, Ph.D, reflects on some of the forces shaping biotech, the areas ripe for bold leaps, and the lessons to carry forward as we continue to grapple with the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic. Once its injected, it instructs cells to produce copies of the spike protein, triggering an immune response. How should they?Flagships Jim Gilbert, Kathy Biberstein and Stephen Hahn share their thoughts on elements of a Goldilocks regulatory framework: Life sciences innovation will benefit from a range of factors that will allow it to become more programmable and engineerable vs. its historic serendipity through lab and real-world trial and error innovation. Moderna (ticker . The Moderna vaccine is given in two doses, 28 days apart. I am not, to be clear, making an argument against reason: I am making the argument against reason alone, and encouraging the question. The National Read Across America Day takes place every year on March 2, Geisels birthday. (Read full essay here). It was one thing for me to [start companies in parallel]. "[36] In July 2021 Afeyan met with Pashinyan in Yerevan. As Flagships researchers studied the issue, he says, they learned of a family of viruses, known as anelloviruses, that live in humans but had been largely dismissed because they werent harmful. Noubar Afeyan is founder, Senior Managing Partner and CEO of Flagship Pioneering, a leading innovation and early-stage venture capital firm. In 2007, Afeyan and David Berry (inventor) co-founded Joule Unlimited, which is developing Solar Fuelsdrop-in fuels produced directly from the sun. Flagship filed 341 patent applications in 2020, more than double the number it had filed two years earlier; in the first half of this year, it cranked out 379 patent applications. He calls his model parallel entrepreneurship, meaning he wants to found multiple companies at a time, not just one or two, but six or eight. Part of it is an innate comfort with discomfort and with not thinking that everything has to be just so.. The answer matters because in gene therapy, treatments are delivered by viruses and those viruses have downsides. It raised $1.1 billion, a huge sum for an agricultural startup, but has struggled to get its operations on track. More importantly, it speaks to the shift from a probabilistic drug discovery industry characterized by multiple shots on goal to the deterministic approach enabled by digital biology. Born in Lebanon, Afeyans family left in 1975 during the Lebanese Civil War and moved to Canada, where he grew up. The vaccine has now been tested on 30,000 volunteers, and has shown promising results, according to the company. "There's a vast range of . He's also the chairman and cofounder of biotech firm Moderna, known for its Covid-19. June 21st, 2021, 12:21 PM PDT. Noubar Afeyan fully understood those risks when he co-founded Moderna in 2010. They have four children. Why wouldnt you think you can actually change the world?, The influx of cash will also test the ability of his model for parallel entrepreneurship to scale up even bigger and faster than it has to date. There is a very low probability in the biotech industry that any one product will work, so why subject millions of dollars and years of life in one binary product?, Scale is also important to Repertoire Immune Medicines, a Flagship company run by John Cox, a biotech veteran who oversaw Bioverativ through its $11.6 billion sale to Sanofi. [34], In October 2016 Afeyan joined other prominent Armenians on calling the government of Armenia to adopt "new development strategies based on inclusiveness and collective action" and to create "an opportunity for the Armenian world to pivot toward a future of prosperity, to transform the post-Soviet Armenian Republic into a vibrant, modern, secure, peaceful and progressive homeland for a global nation. Afeyan was born in Beirut and his family later moved to Montreal, Canada. Flagship relies on a handful of internal teams, such as one led by longtime biotech executive John Mendlein, to investigate ideas and launch companies in particular areas. [10], Besides English, Afeyan speaks Western Armenian. Zaks earned an M.D. This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated. How? [38][39], During the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, Afeyan wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Times in which he called for the US to step in and stop the war. and Ph.D. from the Ben Gurion University in Israel before coming to the United States for post-doctoral research at the National Institutes of Health, as well as clinical training in internal medicine at Temple University Hospital. Preemptive medicine can prevent or delay the onset of disease using new and emerging tools to detect pathways toward disease and interrupt those pathways, helping us individually and collectively to be more resilient in the face of infectious disease. We also knew from the years of work we had done at Moderna that we could encode the protein sequence of virtually any antigen from programmed mRNA and elicit an immune response against that protein. Noubar Afeyan, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, inventor, technologist, and CEO was born to Lebanese-Armenian parents in Lebanon. Following the completion of the transaction, the director now directly owns 2,207,209 shares in the company, valued at approximately . (Source: Bloomberg) More From Leaders with. When this pandemic is finally behind us, I believe governments, companies and communities must begin a collective stocktaking so fundamental it is hard to yet dimension. This past April, for example, Ohana Biosciences, a fertility company that focused on sperm-based treatments, shut its doors and laid off most of its staff a little over a year after emerging from stealth. [9], In 2021, Afeyan announced that Moderna would not enforce its patent rights against anyone using those patents to make Covid-19 vaccines. (Read full essay here). Moderna has a $1.525 billion contract to provide the United States with 100 million doses of the vaccine throughOperation Warp Speed, the governments fast-track program for Covid-19 vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics. He spent his childhood in Beirut until August 1975, when he fled the civil war with his parents and two older brothers at age 13, this time arriving in Canada. Governments ought to purchase them to prevent disease. [4], Afeyan was born to Armenian parents in Beirut, Lebanon in 1962. In addition to investing in startups the idea was to be more systematic in developing companies. From the terrorist attacks of 9/11 emerged a major reorganization and consolidation of certain government agencies and functions, and a fundamental relook at everything from how we monitor the movement of money to how we screen airline passengers. If I had thought about it a lot, I am very sure I would not have started a company. By Kim Yoo-chul Samsung Vice Chairman Lee Jae-yong held talks with Moderna Chairman Noubar Afeyan and Verizon Wireless CEO Hans Vestberg, in a bid to expand their business partnerships amid hyper . Modernas Chief Technical Operations and Quality OfficerJuan Andres immigrated from Spain. Here, he outlines his startup process. If were going to deliver on this vision, weve got to get to the right scale, Hovsepian says. Stphane Bancel, the current CEO, was appointed as CEO in 2011. I was literally mesmerized. Afeyan says, I started to learn everything I could about how to start companies., If you play parallel chess, you have got to get to the essence. And so within days, we had designed a new vaccine and started testing it, Afeyan said, adding that its rapid but accurate. Like other Flagship companies, its also a so-called platform company, something that Afeyan argues reduces the risk of the startups in its portfolio and allows any of them to shift from one area to another as the need arises, as Moderna did with Covid-19 vaccines. 2023 Forbes Media LLC. In 2013, the company formed a partnership with AstraZeneca to develop treatments for cardiovascular, metabolic, and renal . I have often asked why we expect extraordinary breakthroughs from reasonable people doing reasonable things. Ill leave you with a few ideas. Moderna Inc. was founded over four decades later, in 2010 in Cambridge, Massachusetts ( here), by Derrick Rossi, Robert Langer, Kenneth R Chien, and venture capitalist Noubar Afeyan ( here, here . Public market investors nonetheless remain biased toward single-asset biotechs. In 2000, Afeyan founded Flagship Pioneering to create and fund early-stage start-ups addressing unmet needs in healthcare and sustainability. Noubar Afeyan, co-founder and chairman of Moderna, is a two-time immigrant. He is very contrarian in all things.. I thought I didnt have much of a downside, he says. VentureLabs conducted its own research and formed new companies if the research proved promising. How MIT Solve is addressing the global demand for social impact initiatives. The publicly traded company has a market cap of $710 million. The prospect that I wouldve been throwing away a brand-new Ph.D. going into an area that wouldve failedthat thought never occurred to me.. Over time, Afeyan set up a structure for brainstorming new companies. Register for free By incubating its own ideas and doing all the seed and early stage venture funding itself, Flagship typically still owns 50% or so at the time of its startups IPOs, according to Afeyan. Sinkhole swallows vehicle at Ventura County high, Sinkhole at Cal State LA; campus traffic rerouted. In 2014 he helped launch UWC Dilijan, an international boarding school in the town of Dilijan in the mountains of northern Armenia. [11] Afeyan is married to Anna (born Gunnardottir), a Swedish-born engineer who moved to the US in 1988. The building blocks of these biological modalities can be arranged rationally to achieve the desired effects in the human body. When referring to the manufacturing process of the new crown vaccine, Dr. Noubar Afeyan explained that starting from receiving the public sequence of the coronavirus SARS-CoV2 sequence, and then cooperating with NIH to enter the optimized sequence for human trials in the next few days, a large-scale first sequence will be carried out 44 days later. (Read full essay here). As the companies grow, Flagship brings in outside investors, typically raising $100 million or more, with a view toward ultimately going public. Ruben Karlenovich Vardanyan (Armenian: , Russian: ; born 25 May 1968) is an Armenian and Artsakhi politician who served as the State Minister of Artsakh, an unrecognized state in the South Caucasus, from 4 November 2022 until 23 February 2023. Dr. Noubar Afeyan was honored with the 2020 "Appeal of Conscience Award" for his leadership "in helping to heal our wounded world at the time of the pandemic," according to the award citation. Moderna founders debut on Forbes' list of 400 richest Americans. "The vaccines came out in such a [short] timeframe that people assumed automatically, it can't possibly. As my colleagues Stephen Berenson and Andy Oh explain: Bioplatforms have several advantages. Noubar has dedicated his career to improving the human condition by systematically creating science-based innovations that serve as the foundation for startup companies. After attending college, Afeyan came to the United States and earned a Ph.D. in biochemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Noubar Afeyan (Western Armenian: ; born in 1962) is an American-Canadian entrepreneur, inventor, and philanthropist. What if red blood cells could transport drugs along with oxygen? As the firms researchers explore ideas, theyll change their approachor even what theyre working onwith little regard for how the outside world might view such seeming flip-flops. What Now? He became chief business officer of Applera, the successor company to Perkin-Elmers life sciences business, but was soon thinking about his next move. He also leads the firm's VentureLabs unit that invents and launches transformative startups. Reflecting on his career trajectory, he realized that being an immigrant has had a significant influence on his path. But he recalled Packards advice that when a field is brand new, just about any innovation in it will be valuable. Afeyan views immigrants and entrepreneurs as natural complements. [21], Afeyans awards include the Ellis Island Medal of Honor,[22] an award granted to outstanding Americans who have distinguished themselves as U.S. citizens, and who exemplify outstanding qualities in both their personal and professional lives, while continuing to preserve the richness of their particular heritage. Since the advent of modern medicine we have focused more on treating the symptoms we can see and measure than on addressing the underlying disease. [2] In total, he co-founded or helped build over 50 life science and technology startups. Not only did an immigrant found Moderna but many of its key leadership positions, including its CEO, are immigrants. Each began life as little more than an idea in a lab. "[1], In 2009 Afeyan co-founded Moderna (formerly ModeRNA Therapeutics) and currently serves as its chairman. The U.S. immigration system has nostartup visafor founding a company, which is often is an obstacle for foreign nationals with good ideas. "[5] His family fled Lebanon in 1975, during the civil war there. Noubar Afeyan, Moderna's Chairman (worth $1.9 billion) Juan Lopez-Belmonte, Chairman of ROVI, a company with a deal to manufacture and package the Moderna vaccine (worth $1.8 billion) Linkedin Noubar Afeyan is founder, Senior Managing Partner and CEO of Flagship Ventures, a leading early stage venture capital firm. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, admitted the preliminary data for the Moderna and the Pfizer vaccines the only two so far to have early estimates of vaccine efficacy are better than he had anticipated. Afeyan has since launched 40 other companies, including Moderna, which is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Just as the term biotechnology was introduced to describe the application of engineering and biosciences principles to raw materials to create new products, we believe the next century will be one of digital biology, in which complex biological problems are translated into computational ones. It was another to make it a process, Afeyan says. Ideas that surviveas a total of 89 haveget numbers rather than names to keep founders from falling in love with a pet project that may need to be killed. [16][17], Afeyan started his first biotechnology company in 1987, just a few days before Black Monday, and founded or co-founded five more companies within ten years. He was born to Armenian parents in Lebanon and immigrated with his family in his early teens to Canada. in chemical engineering from McGill University in 1983 and then moved to the US and earned a Ph.D. in biochemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1987. The advent of programmable medicines and digital biology can change the paradigm to one that is more deterministic and highly productive. All Rights Reserved. This page was last edited on 10 August 2020, at 04:14. But thats the way Noubar thinks, and he has stuck with it the whole time.. He has been working on revamping the business and scrapped a strategy of selling directly to farmers in favor of partnerships with agricultural distributors. Between 2011 and 2017, Moderna raised $2 billion in venture capital funding.. On the one hand, 2021 was an extraordinary year for life science investment, with several chart-topping raises by early-stage companies. from his Alma Mater, This page was last edited on 1 March 2023, at 23:54. MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) has received a three-year gift from the Afeyan Family Foundation to support student and faculty collaborations between MIT and Armenia. The work in the microbiome, in part, led to more recent work on viruses as Afeyan and his team questioned whether there are viruses in our bodies that arent pathological. They said, How can anyone give you money? The vaccine was developed two days after [publication of the coronaviruss genomic] sequence. Most of those companies grow out of those what-if questions that Afeyan loves. Moderna, Inc. (NASDAQ:MRNA - Get Rating) Director Noubar Afeyan sold 10,000 shares of the company's stock in a transaction that occurred on Wednesday, February 15th. If the idea proves promising enough, Flagship invests, and it operates for a time as a wholly owned subsidiary. While Moderna is by far its largest, other publicly traded graduates include Denali Therapeutics (market cap $6.3 billion), which is working on treatments for neurodegenerative diseases; Quanterix (market cap $2.1 billion), which makes tools to measure proteins for disease detection and treatment; and Rubius (market cap $1.3 billion), which uses red blood cells as treatments for cancer and autoimmune diseases. The story of how Moderna rose to its position in helping to lead the fight against Covid-19 and other medical threats is uniquely American, a story of welcoming talent from all over the world. [3], In 1988, Afeyan founded PerSeptive Biosystems in Cambridge, MA. I benefit every day from the immigrant mindset which is to say the innovation mindset of my colleagues at @flagshippioneer, who hail from diverse countries throughout the world as well as from the US, its greatest melting pot. (Source: Bloomberg) He started . In March 2010[8] and in March 2011,[9] Joule was named by Technology Review as one of the 50 Most Innovative Companies. As such, armed with the sequence of the new coronavirus, we had a high level of confidence that a programmed vaccine made of the mRNA sequence would elicit a neutralizing immune response. [26], In 2008 Afeyan, Vardanyan and others co-founded the National Competitiveness Foundation of Armenia, a private-public partnership dedicated to promoting economic development in the country. Founded in 2000, Flagship is an enterprise where entrepreneurially-minded scientists invent seemingly unreasonable solutions to challenges If you see an error in this story, contact us. I constantly say things that are unreasonable and seemingly crazy, says Noubar Afeyan, founder of venture firm Flagship Pioneering and chairman of Moderna. Noubar Afeyan is Founder, Senior Managing Partner and Chief Executive Officer at Flagship Ventures, a leading early stage venture capital firm. Noubar has to find the way increasingly to figure out how to run a bigger organization and keep his finger on the pulse, says David Epstein, who joined Flagship as an executive partner in 2017 after having been CEO of Novartis Pharmaceuticals. The virus continues to evolve the mutations from the Wuhan strain have now taken us more than halfway through the Greek alphabet with Omicrons relentless wave of transmission delivering a powerful reminder of the need to improve detection, response, and variant-proof protection. [20] Afeyan serves on multiple charitable and corporate boards, including those of Codiak Biosciences, Evelo Biosciences, Joule Unlimited and Axcella. Get its operations on track can anyone give you money a downside, he realized that being an immigrant had... That serve as the foundation for startup companies selling directly to farmers in favor of partnerships with distributors. 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