Theres also a structure to how Flagships researchers consider dozens of ideas, accepting some and rejecting others. It was a very irrational thing to do, he says. He received the Golden Door Award in 2017 from the International Institute of New England in recognition of his contribution to the US as a foreign-born American. The only criticism I have faced on this score has been from some Israeli interviewers who wanted to know why I regard Jews who converted as remaining part of the Jewish cultural unconscious. Our sales over recent weeks and months were pursuant to a 10b5-1 plan put in place last December and executed in two installments following the passage of 60 days from the original filing, a spokesperson for Flagship told Forbes. ), The park was opened on May 22, 2012 with a celebration that included then Gov. Flagship is a venture capital firm with a total of $17 billion in assets that operates more like an incubator. Its chair and co-founder, Noubar Afeyan, a Beirut-born Armenian who immigrated to the U.S., had become fascinated by mRNA in 2010, when he heard a pitch from a group of Harvard and MIT researchers. Immigrant-Founded Moderna Leading The Way In Covid-19 Response, A Wave Of Insider Selling Has Completed Morgan Stanleys Moderna Shuffle, 'MIT Solve' Enables Tech Entrepreneurs To Conquer Global Social Challenges, International Students Are Founding America's Great Startups, Noubar Afeyan Has Had 38 Biotech Wins. All we are doing is running an evolutionary process, he says. BioNTech partnered with Pfizer to make the first vaccine authorized by regulators in the U.S., a milestone announced by the FDA on December 11, 2020. Noubar Afeyan is the founder and CEO of Cambridge, Mass. [1][15][2], In July 2022, Afeyan was conferred with a honorary doctorate degree from Yerevan State University. Shortly after the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a global pandemic on March 11, 2020, markets collapsed and economies around the world plunged into recession. There is nothing racist in stating that Jews have been awarded one-fifth of the Nobel prizes in science. Everybody loves Moderna, but [platforms] tend to be something that is in fashion or out of fashion. Li Wenmei is the cofounder and general manager of diagnostic test supplier Guangzhou Wondfo Biotech, which makes a range of Covid-19 tests. The writer heads the Zvi Griliches Research Data Center at S. Neaman Institute, Technion and blogs at www.timnovate.wordpress.com, Hebrew edition: Kinneret, Zmora, Dvir: Modi-in, 2020, 511 pages, Sign up for The Jerusalem Post Premium Plus for just $5, Upgrade your reading experience with an ad-free environment and exclusive content. Ren Jinsheng is the founder and chairman of pharmaceuticals supplier Simcere Pharmaceutical Group, which increased its production of antiviral drugs arbidol and zanamivir in response to higher demand in the hopes they could help treat Covid-19. At the age of 13, he immigrated with his family to Canada and attended [], Ph.D, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Bachelor of Science, McGill University. He was a senior lecturer at MITs Sloan School of Management from 2000 to 2016, and a lecturer at Harvard Business School until 2020. Kahvejian introduced and recognized the representatives of the five different organizations serving immigrants and refugees: The greater Boston Immigrant Defense Fund; International Institute of New England; Irish International Immigrant Center; Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition and Refugepoint. At the same time, one high-profile investor in Cambridge, Massachusetts-based vaccine maker Modernalife sciences VC outfit Flagship Pioneering, led by Moderna cofounder and chairman Noubar Afeyancashed in on the firms soaring stock price, selling more than $1.5 billion in shares since the World Health Organization declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020. 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Like the Pfizer-BioNTech version, Modernas COVID-19 vaccine, too, has proven highly effective in clinical trials. [1] Noubar Afeyan, co-founder and chairman of Moderna, discussed a new COVID-19 therapeutic and booster shots during an exclusive interview on Tuesday, noting that there could be a "continuous need . [1], Afeyan sits on the boards of the MIT Corporation, the Boston Symphony Orchestra,[21][22][15] and the Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU). transformed Judaism from a cult based on ritual sacrifices to a religion whose main norm required every Jewish man to read and study the Torah in Hebrew and to send his sons to school or synagogue to learn to do so. Noubar entered biotechnology during its emergence as an academic field and industry, completing his doctoral work in biochemical engineering at MIT in 1987. The Talmud is full of argumentative Rabbis with good questions and we Jews have been arguing and imitating them for at least two thousand years. Noubar Afeyan is a serial entrepreneur Afeyan has made a career out of being a co-founder. The unifying force of the Temple was replaced by the unifying force of Torah. It was one thing for me to [start companies in parallel]. Jianquans Winner Medical made billions of masks and millions of protective overalls and gowns for healthcare workers fighting the virus. 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. My grandparents came to this county and [so did] my mother. Bancel knew he needed to reach out to Moderna cofounder Noubar Afeyan, the serial biotech entrepreneur who runs Flagship Pioneering in Cambridge and chairs Moderna's board of directors. Dr. Noubar Afeyan's 32-year career as an inventor, entrepreneur and CEO has . He and his wife Veronika invest in large-scale multifaceted projects in the sphere of global education, Sustainable . 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. Each began life as little more than an idea in a lab. Zhu Tao, Qiu Dongxu, Yu Xuefeng and Mao Huihua are cofounders of Tianjin-based vaccine manufacturer CanSino Biologics, which received conditional approval for its one-shot Covid-19 vaccine from Chinese regulators in February. [40], In November 2020, Afeyan confirmed that the Canadian government had been among the first countries to pre-order the Moderna vaccine; the country is guaranteed to get some portion of the first batch dispensed to the public. Noubar Afeyan at Flagship Pioneering in Cambridge, Mass. A Greek Jew, two Turkish-born Germans, a Lebanese Armenian and an Israeli walk into a bar. It has since been expanded to 2031. ahin is the CEO and cofounder of BioNTech, which he started alongside his wife and chief medical officer zlem Treci. Moderna co-founders Noubar Afeyan and Robert Langer along with early investor Timothy Springer were named to Forbes' list of the 400 richest people in the US. (Each year the two halves of the sculpture are pried apart and reconfigured in a new way, to symbolize leaving the past and creating a new life. NOUBAR AFEYAN, CO-FOUNDER AND CHAIRMAN, MODERNA: Great to be here, Walter. 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. The richest of these new billionaires is Li Jianquan, the president of Chinese medical products manufacturer Winner Medical, which ramped up production of masks and medical overalls to supply frontline workers across the globe. Since 2007, when Flagship adopted its current model, through the first half of 2021, its net internal rate of return, or IRR, was nearly 40%, according to a source close to Flagship. As its assets have grown the pace at which Flagship has founded startups has accelerated. He is the founded of the Cambridge-based life sciences innovation firm Flagship Pioneering. A special guest at the program was Dr. Vartan Gregorian, the president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Afeyans partner at the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative, as well as an immigrant himself. Photo by Jake Belcher. Liang Yaoming chairs clinical testing company Guangzhou Kingmed Diagnostics Group, which processed tests for Covid-19 at its facilities throughout China. Here, he outlines his startup process. Draw a circle around what currently exists, Afeyan says, and then draw a bigger circle around whats adjacent to that. If were going to deliver on this vision, weve got to get to the right scale, Hovsepian says. [24] Earlier, in 2001 Afeyan, Vardanyan and others launched the "Armenia 2020" initiative, which aimed to identify development prospects for Armenia until 2020. Noubar was born in Beirut to Armenian parents in 1962, did his undergraduate work at McGill University in Montreal, and completed his Ph.D. in biochemical engineering at MIT in 1987. But there are great many other Jewish geniuses in his book, far less well-known. I cover the world's richest people and how they made their billions. Miller is the founder and executive chairman of healthcare services provider Universal Health Services, which conducts testing for Covid-19 and treats patients at its network of hospitals across the U.S. Cao Xiaochun is the cofounder and director of pharmaceutical contract research outfit Hangzhou Tigermed Consulting, which supported clinical trials for CanSinos Covid-19 vaccine. Primary Menu Sections Search Rao Wei and Weng Xianding are the chairman and majority shareholder, respectively, of biomedical firm Shenzhen New Industries Biological Engineering, which makes a number of Covid-19 diagnostic tests. Noubar Afeyan, an Armenian immigrant born in Lebanon, is one of the most successful biotech entrepreneurs at work. [1][3][2] His grandfather survived the Armenian genocide. Its a very different model, says Avak Kahvejian, a general partner at Flagship (and distant cousin of Afeyans). Modernas chief medical officer is Dr. Tal Zaks, an Israeli who completed his M.D. The publicly traded company has a market cap of $710 million. Many founders become serial entrepreneurs, starting companies and moving on, sometimes in rapid succession. In 2022, Afeyan was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science, honoris causa (D.Sc.) Two Flagship fundsFlagship Ventures Fund IV, L.P. and Flagship Ventures Fund IV-Rx, L.P.sold 53% of their Moderna holdings, about 10.3 million shares, for more than $1.4 billion (pretax) in three sets of sales in late February and late March this year. With $17 billion and a model of parallel entrepreneurship, he can fund a lot of wild notions. He points to his immigrant background and mentality as the driving forces of his philanthropic, scientific, and business work. 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. And that's . Bourla is Jewish. PerSeptive developed leading-edge technology in protein analysis, and grew to $100 million in revenue before Afeyan, sold it to scientific instruments conglomerate Perkin-Elmer for $360 million in 1998. They begin by asking What if? and iterate toward the unexpected answers resulting in the creation of first-in-category bioplatform companies with significant impact. In an interview with The Associated Press, Noubar Afeyan also reiterated a pledge Moderna made a year ago not to enforce patent infringement on anyone else making a coronavirus vaccine during the pandemic. Was it perhaps because of your book about the Jewish composer Gustav Mahler? You cannot procrastinate over the particular move. Feng Yuxia is the president of Beijing-based contract research organization JOINN Laboratories, which helped conduct clinical studies of potential Covid-19 treatments in the diseases early epicenter of Wuhan, China. He and his wife Veronika invest in large-scale multifaceted projects in the sphere of global education, Sustainable . [29], With Vardanyan and Vartan Gregorian, Afeyan co-founded the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative in 2015. . Another pandemic-era billionaire, Uur ahin of German biotech outfit BioNTech, has also never sold a share in the company he cofounded in 2008 with his wife (and the firms chief medical officer) zlem Treci. "We think that was the right, responsible thing to do." Between 2000 and 2005 the firm produced an average of two companies a year. Dr. Afeyan is founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering, a company that conceives, creates, resources, and develops first-in-category bioplatform companies to transform human health and . During his career as inventor, entrepreneur, and CEO, Noubar has cofounded and helped build over 70 life science and technology startups. Flagship Pioneering conceives, creates, resources, and develops first-in-category life sciences companies to transform human health and . In June, Flagship raised $3.4 billion for a new fund, a giant pool of money even at a time when investment has been flowing to biotechnology and therapeutics. A total of $3 million has been deemed necessary by the foundation for the maintenance to go on in perpetuity; of that total, $2.1 million has been raised thus far. He and his colleagues were looking for a way to deploy the messenger RNA molecule to tackle life-threatening. We would like to show you a description here but the site won't allow us. 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. Some, such as Moderna CEO Stphane Bancel and BioNTech cofounder Uur ahin, have become household names thanks to the vaccines they helped develop. Afeyan was born in Beirut and his family later moved to Montreal, Canada. One year later, things couldnt be more different: a record 493 new billionaires joined the list this year, propelled by a red-hot stock market and unprecedented economic stimulus. Modernas fifth-largest individual shareholder, president Stephen Hoge, sold $65.5 million worth of Moderna stock since March 2020; Hoges 0.4% stake in Moderna is worth roughly $300 million, but he also owns about $545 million in options. By Noubar Afeyan. Have you faced such criticism? Moderna has clearly super-powered those returns. Beyond his stake in Moderna, he also owns shares in more than a dozen publicly traded biotech companies in the U.S. He was also awarded a Great Immigrant honor from the Carnegie Corporation in 2016, received a Technology Pioneer award from the World Economic Forum in 2012, and was presented with the Ellis Island Medal of Honor in 2008. Startups has accelerated, has proven highly effective in clinical trials the Cambridge-based life sciences companies to transform human and. 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