Name: Catching Up with Moderna chairman Noubar Afeyan
Uploaded: 2021-12-01
Duration: 6 min 6 s
Description: Afeyan walks us through the development of Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine from inception to distribution.

Afeyan walks us through the development of Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine from inception to distribution.

Catching Up with Moderna chairman Noubar Afeyan

Health

Noubar Afeyan is also CEO of Flagship Pioneering, Moderna's founding company.

Moderna chairman discusses COVID-19 vaccine development

Watch: Catching Up with Moderna chairman Noubar Afeyan

mm mhm mhm. Moderna has been an unusual company in the biotech sense of things because most biotech companies focus on individual drug assets and Moderna actually focused on platform, the common set of technologies or biological breakthroughs that can allow many, many products to be generated. And so in this case the one platform that we built was a platform based on Messenger RNA. The technology to design, make analyzed scale and marry none of that was existent at all, either in academia or in industry and so we had to build it from scratch. We knew that out of that platform would come many many drugs and in fact by 2015 we started testing our first vaccine which was a flu vaccine actually. And from there we expanded that such that by the time COVID-19 arrived we already had almost 20 different programs That we were developing internally for human therapeutics and vaccines. So we went from an idea to a platform to a robust pipeline of products plus the platform which itself was growing in its uh scale and that has been kind of a ten-year journey that Madonna took to get to the point in 2020 when we started applying it to yet another vaccine. But in this case it became a pandemic mhm. Early in january we began to read about a mysterious disease in china which is always of interest to us because we do vaccines and so we always want to keep an eye on this. But by no means that we realized it was going to be a serious threat. And so kind of a couple of weeks into january, the sequence started appearing of what this virus might be. Once we knew it was a corona virus, we had a program in the murders, the Middle Eastern variant of this coronavirus. So we knew that there was a basis to think that we could do a vaccine because we've already been working on that january 21st was the date that that really was significant in that. That's the date when Stefan and I had a discussion where he had been exposed to a lot of public health officials who are concerned about this. Beginning more serious and we have to make a decision do we want to add yet another program to our pipeline overnight to begin to make the drug for testing or the vaccine for tests? We decided to do that. It was not called the pandemic. There hadn't been many deaths at the time. We decided to do that partly because we could meaning our platform lends itself to it and partly because we thought it would be a great way to test how quickly our platform could respond. The job went not from, look how fast we can go to look how far we can scale and how well we can execute getting something all the way to clinical approval. And that was a totally different decision, which we were almost forced to make at the time. By the time this became a pandemic, there was no return. But interestingly in the beginning we would have done this even if it didn't become a pandemic because there's a great Scientific medical unmet need that featured our platform. We've spent 10 years and over $2 billion dollars developing up until that point, We got the first information that it was efficacious back in May of 2020 in our phase one trials in humans. There was no question we were generating a huge amount of anybody's more than sufficient for any other coronavirus and we were sure that this was going to be implications. But that wasn't a very small number of people, hundreds of people. Whereas now we needed to do it in tens of thousands of people. The data for that came about in November of 2020. Not only did we know that it was going to be efficacious and how efficacious it was at the 94-plus% level, but also that it was safe and we were very gratified because that's singularly the risk. Almost all of our other vaccine programs at such a large scale because our products, unlike normal vaccines is exactly the same product, no matter what we're going after with the exception that the sequence of RNA is slightly different. So the molecule that we put in the LMP the particles, the RNA, they're all basically the same constituents in a slightly different order making a different protein. The safety concerns come from the LMP come from putting em on a and now suddenly we had massive amount of data. We were very happy about that. Of course. Since then we've now given this to hundreds of millions of people and the safety profile has stretched over that. We have 20 programs before COVID came and we have 34 programs now. Um we have added some programs. We think that the vaccine, the risking certainly makes it necessary for us to work on seasonal flu RSV is another vaccine program which we have accelerated as a result, it's another respiratory serious viral infection. We are working on combinations of M RNA vaccine. Something else that's quite unusual to think about right now. We take one shot for flu, take a booster shot for covid. Well what about if you can put all these into a single shot while our technology allows you to do that because it's a set of molecules and the same carrier can be used with a single shot, which is much more compliant. HIV is another program. We've accelerated as a result of this because now that we know we could make a multi auntie Gin kind of vaccine uh which means many different things inside of our vaccine. HIV needs many many animals. It's not a single protein you're going to make, we have cancer programs. We have cardiovascular programs. We have rare disease programs and how we decide among those is a portfolio analysis of the kind of risks inherent in each. How quickly we can make progress to take some of these into late stage clinical trials, maybe even the market. So we want to have some late stage programs, some early programs, pretty kind of typical of the way one thinks about a big portfolio for pharmaceutical company. The only difference is all of this derives from our platform. So there's a commonality and there's an intrinsic shared risk that we're leveraging in every decision we make.