noubar afeyan family
Afeyan has helped start more than 70 public and private healthcare and life sciences companies over the course of his career. Moderna was founded in 2010 by Derrick Rossi, Timothy A. Springer, Kenneth R. Chien, Robert S. Langer, and Noubar Afeyan. Reflecting on his career trajectory, he realized that being an immigrant has had a significant influence on his path. your family name and home country credentials don't mean much when . Hes very provocative and very challenging and very demanding, says Simba Gill, CEO of Evelo Biosciences, a Flagship company focused on the microbiome, who first met Afeyan more than two decades ago. Moderna founders debut on Forbes' list of 400 richest Americans. For Afeyan, though, the hope is that Moderna isnt a one-off stratospheric success, but just one of dozens of companies that could break out from the work hes been doing at Cambridge, Mass.-based Flagship for the past two decades. Similarly, we have now directly experienced the devastating collision of the fast pandemic of COVID-19 with the slow pandemics of chronic disease. This page was last edited on 10 August 2020, at 04:14. On February 24, 2020, the company made worldwide news when it announced the release of the first batch of mRNA-1273, the Companys vaccine against the novel coronavirus, for human use. Vials were shipped to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for a Phase 1 study. It was one thing for me to [start companies in parallel]. It raised $1.1 billion, a huge sum for an agricultural startup, but has struggled to get its operations on track. 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. ", "Making Immigration Great Again at Tribute to Afeyan", "Noubar Afeyan conferred honorary doctorate degree of Yerevan State University", "Noubar Afeyan Receives Honorary Doctorate from Yerevan State University Asbarez.com", "What we know about Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine candidate and what we don't", "Moderna chairman: We don't need deep-freeze conditions for vaccine", "IDeA Foundation Comes Up with New Development Initiatives for Armenia", "5/10/15: "Armenia-2020", the arrival of Vivacell, the call of Hillary Clinton", "Armenia's National Competitiveness Foundation attends Global Competitiveness Summit", "National Competitiveness Foundation Board Of Trustees Holds Regular Meeting", "PM Nikol Pashinyan's Congratulatory Message on 5th Anniversary of Aurora Humanitarian Initiative", "Ruben Vardanyan and Noubar Afeyan congratulate Nikol Pashinyan on his election as Prime Minister of Armenia", "President Sarkissian spoke on the phone with the well-known Armenian-American businessman and benefactor Noubar Afeyan", "President Armen Sarkissian had a distant conversation with the American businessman and benefactor Noubar Afeyan: combination of experience and knowledge will produce positive results", "Canada 'not at the back of the line' for COVID-19 vaccine, Moderna chairman says | CBC News", "Noubar Afeyan Receives 2008 Ellis Island Medal of Honor", "Tigran Sargsyan Visits Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Meets With Armenian Community In Boston", ". " " 2- ", "8 Lebanese At Moderna Just Received The National Order Of Merit", "Moderna's Noubar Afeyan awarded Lebanon's Order of Merit", "The Future is Bright: McGill's Honorary Degree recipients for Spring Convocation 2022", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Noubar_Afeyan&oldid=1142358360, Armenian Prime Ministers Commemorative Medal for Patriotic Activities (2012), Medal of Services to the Motherland (2014) by President of Armenia. 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. He started his first company at age 24 and ran it for 10 years, during which time he founded or co-founded five additional companies. The European Medicines Agency announced Monday that it has begun a rolling review of the Moderna vaccine. Public market investors nonetheless remain biased toward single-asset biotechs. The crisis has thrown into relief the powerful forces shaping our industry, and those forces, taken together and furthered by innovation, capital, and talent, make it possible to totally rethink how we define and approach illness and disease, and protect and prolong our health. Other immigrants in key leadership positions at Moderna include Chief Medical Officer Tal Zaks, in charge of clinical development at the company. [6] Since 2000 this process has led to the launch of around 40 companies. Years later, as the Communist regime took over Bulgaria, the Afeyans moved again, escaping to Greece before settling in Lebanon in the early-1950s. "Whether or not the United States and Russia intervene to quell the violence has implications for vulnerable peoples around the world. day. Like many Armenians, Noubar Afeyan's family moved from country to country, trying to find a safe haven. Noubar Afeyan (born July 25, 1962), is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, inventor, technologist, and CEO. Jobs at Flagship Pioneering and our Companies. He started . The contract gives the U.S. government an option to purchase an additional 400 million doses. He was not from the country. Noubar Afeyan is the founder and CEO of Cambridge, Mass. [6] The firm also works with external academic innovations and, in some cases, with early-stage companies looking to partner. Woman accused of fatally stabbing her mother in O.C. Richard Azarnia is a principal in a family that believes in its responsibility to support a new model of development that . How MIT Solve is addressing the global demand for social impact initiatives. By contrast, messenger RNA is more like software: it can be used to perform a task and then can be programmed to disappear. In 1999 he founded Flagship Ventures to develop new companies through its in-house division VentureLabs. Afeyan views immigrants and entrepreneurs as natural complements. He also leads the firm's VentureLabs unit that invents and launches transformative startups. 1. 2023 Forbes Media LLC. [33] and Future Armenian public initiative. Joule was named as one of the 10 most important emerging technologies in 2010. It has since been expanded to 2031. As Moderna shares plunge below $50 in Wednesday morning trading, I called back to my Forbes article of last week. Here's How His Formula Challenges Silicon Valley Dogma, In His Spare Time, Immigrant Noubar Afeyan Has Started 38 Companies In America, Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information, Limit the Use of My Sensitive Personal Information. Afeyan is a lecturer at Harvard Business School and also taught at MIT's Sloan School of Management from 2000 to 2016. Take, for example, the burgeoning applications of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to biology. Noubar Afeyan . Perhaps a second question for all of us in and beyond biotech to take into 2022 is: What Now? He is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Probablemente Noubar Afeyan no sea muy conocido fuera de los crculos de emprendedores e inversionistas, pero durante el ltimo ao una de. 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. Programmable medicines are part of a larger transformative force that is already being felt: digital biology or the conversion of physical matter into information. Flagship Pioneering Founder and CEO and Moderna Co-founder and Chairman Dr. Noubar Afeyan presents at the 2022 Code Conference.Subscribe: https://goo.gl/FRle. Whats remarkable is that the technology we have developed was perfectly suited for this type of very rapid deployment. Flagship has shut down four companies in which it invested $10 million or more, as well as 13 early-stage startups in which it had invested less than that amount. As of November 2021, his net worth is estimated at $3.3 billion. In 2009, he co-founded Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Moderna, Inc. Modernas CEO is Stphane Bancel, who immigrated to America from France. 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. How? Zaks earned an M.D. Highly Skilled Immigrants Drive U.S. "[36] In July 2021 Afeyan met with Pashinyan in Yerevan. He was living a similar life to what I live now. The Moderna vaccine is given in two doses, 28 days apart. In its final accounting, this pandemic will likely log a death toll that far surpasses the mass casualties of the genocides and holocaust of the past century. Moderna, which is leading Americas response to the novel coronavirus, is a story of welcoming talent from all over the world. He and his colleagues were looking for a way to deploy the messenger RNA molecule to tackle life-threatening. The answer, to me, is the big scientific breakthroughs that come from bold scientific leaps. life sciences innovation firm Flagship Pioneering. In the case of the Moderna vaccine, we long knew that the spike protein on the coronavirus played a critical role in its ability to enter and infect cells. Afeyan is a member of the board of UWC Dilijan International School in Armenia, founded by Vardanyan in 2014. What Now? They have the flexibility to rapidly enable new programs in response to unforeseen opportunities. life sciences innovation firm Flagship Pioneering. I constantly say things that are unreasonable and seemingly crazy, says Noubar Afeyan, founder of venture firm Flagship Pioneering and chairman of Moderna. Flagship Pioneering, a VC fund run and majority owned by Moderna chairman and cofounder Noubar Afeyan, sold the shares in late February and late March. To support the global scaling of breakthrough innovation to preempt and address fundamental human and planet health challenges, the Goldilocks regulatory framework for life sciences should aspire to be as innovative as the science it is regulating and as bold as the problems the innovation is looking to address. In 2000, Afeyan founded Flagship Pioneering to create and fund early-stage start-ups addressing unmet needs in healthcare and sustainability. 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. Ill leave you with a few ideas. Packard, who died in 1996, described himself as a new breed of engineer, a blend of entrepreneur and innovator. They can create multiple related (highly correlated) or unrelated (low correlated) programs, in which the success of a vanguard program substantially derisks future highly correlated follow-on programs. If the idea proves out in the lab, Flagship gives the new company a name and commits $20 million or more to it as a wholly owned subsidiary. The dotcoms were infatuating the markets. Noubar Afeyan, co-founder and chairman of Moderna, is a two-time immigrant. The Moderna vaccine reduced the risk of Covid-19 infection by 94.5%. A recent article in Boston Business Journal listed the top 10 biotech investment rounds in the Boston area in 2021: the average raised was $397 million. Donald Trump cannot take credit for the vaccines. In an effort to shed some light on Moderna's history-making startup journey, Crunchbase News sat down with Afeyan, a venture capitalist and serial entrepreneur who's been building startups for more than three decades. Unlike a flu shot, which contains fragments of the influenza virus so your immune system can learn to attack them, an RNA vaccine gives your body the genetic code needed to produce viral fragments on its own. 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 . 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. 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. There is one enemy thats the virus.. If you play parallel chess, you have got to get to the essence. This letter explores four of the forces shaping biotechs future: programmable medicines and digital biology; machine learning and artificial intelligence; the exponential value potential of bioplatforms; and a pandemic-inspired regulatory reset. [15], Since 2000, Afeyan has been teaching courses on entrepreneurship, innovation and leadership at the Massachusetts Institute of Technologys Sloan School of Management. Since Flagships launch, Afeyan has helped start some 70 companies. 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. Still, Moderna co-founder Noubar Afeyan understands the hesitation to get a new vaccine. He did his undergraduate work at McGill University and completed his PhD in biochemical engineering in MIT. [10] Joule's unique and innovative approach to fuels led to its being named a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum in 2012[11] and to its receiving the Silver Medal in the 2011 Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Awards. The company creates companies through a systemic model of entrepreneurial science. History. Born in Beirut, Lebanon, and of Armenian heritage, Dr. Afeyan and his family fled the Lebanese Civil War in the 1970s and settled in Montreal as political refugees. Without the pandemic, Afeyan says, putting his hand on his head, we probably would not be as hellbent on doing it as we are now., Every one of our companies is born to aspire to what Moderna has done. The vaccine or the platform? Afeyan is leveraging that success to raise boatloads of new cash. He has been completed his graduation from McGill University and has completed his PhD in Biochemical Engineering in 1987. 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. While scientists had talked about the microbiome for years, when Afeyan first broached the idea in 2008 of exploring its role in disease, including autoimmune diseases and cancer, it was pretty far out on the fringe. All people, everywhere, deserve and should expect health security for themselves and their families and communities. [16] Afeyan has authored numerous scientific publications[17] and patents. Afeyan graduated from McGill . Born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1962 to Armenian parents, he and his family fled the Lebanese Civil War to move to Montreal in 1975. There were only five infections in patients who developed Covid-19 after receiving Modernas vaccine, mRNA-1273. in the middle. Noubar Afeyan (born July 25, 1962), is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, inventor, technologist, and CEO. [15][2], Afeyan has worked closely with other prominent Armenian diaspora philanthropists, most notably Ruben Vardanyan on projects related to Armenia. After attending college, Afeyan came to the United States and earned a Ph.D. in biochemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). [3], In 1988, Afeyan founded PerSeptive Biosystems in Cambridge, MA. As Flagship has expanded, Afeyan has recruited a bevvy of high-powered executives to help out, both as partners of the firm and as CEOs of the new startups. [7] The company's annual revenues grew to $100 million and in 1998 was acquired by PerkinElmer/Applera and became CBO of Applera. The companies said they will file for an emergency use authorization with the Food and Drug Administration in the coming weeks, and will file with other global regulators. Consider Flagships work in the microbiome, the flourishing microorganisms that live within us, especially in our guts. COVID-19 Accelerates Vaccine Manufacturing. Not everything goes smoothly, of course. Its a very different model, says Avak Kahvejian, a general partner at Flagship (and distant cousin of Afeyans). fast-tracks health care innovations, says Moderna's chairman. A startup visa is one way. This hasnt really been possible in biology. Through it Afeyan is churning out scientific ideas in biotech, the life sciences and agriculture with the goal of creating and nurturing a half dozen or more companies each year. Once its injected, it instructs cells to produce copies of the spike protein, triggering an immune response. The record shows immigrants and immigrant-led companies created the vaccines. Noubar Afeyan is founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering. Far superior ways to engage, involve and empower citizens to improve their own health will be central to a preemptive medicine paradigm precisely because the absence of symptoms means that participation is a choice, rather than a compulsion to alleviate pain or discomfort. There he oversaw the creation of Celera Genomics. The National Read Across America Day takes place every year on March 2, Geisels birthday. Afeyan says his goal is simply to help people, and he credited his drive and passion for philanthropy to his immigrant mentality. He was born to Armenian parents in Lebanon and immigrated with his family in his early teens to Canada. Afeyan, 59, is one of five billionaires associated with it, with an estimated $2.9 billion fortune (Bancel is another, worth some $7.5 billion). Many founders become serial entrepreneurs, starting companies and moving on, sometimes in rapid succession. Noubar Afeyan and Gary P. Pisano From the Magazine (September-October 2021) Florian Sommet/Trunk Archive Summary. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Just four or five years ago, a typical Series B raised $50 million. He is best known for co-founding the biotechnology company Moderna, through his venture capital firm, Flagship Pioneering, and for co-founding humanitarian projects such as Aurora Prize and The Future Armenian.As of November 2021, his net worth is . As my colleagues Armen Mkrtchyan and Karim Lakhani write in an essay published by Flagship earlier this week: We believe AI and biology are the principal and mutually enabling innovation engines of our generation, particularly so when combining forces. 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. At the time of Flagships founding two decades ago, biotech was out of favor and so-called platform companiesthat worked on a concept like mRNA rather than a specific drugwere the most unpopular. But Afeyan wondered if he could create a structure to start multiple companies at one time, always having multiple early-stage ideas and potential startups percolating in the labs. As a result, we can start to think of drugs as instructions or programs that have predictable outcomes and vice versa, we can envision an outcome, and then design the right program to achieve it. Noubar Afeyan Moderna spent the past decade combining bioengineering, chemical engineering, and systems engineering advances to create its mRNA platform and a large development pipeline of 24 mRNA-based therapeutics and vaccines. Dr. Noubar Afeyan is Founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering, a unique enterprise that systematically makes breakthrough, life-science innovations, which improve human health and sustainability. But he still likes to keep a hand in everything. The underlying cause of most autoimmune diseases is related to T-cell misbehavior, Cox explains. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one. We can now develop tools that allow us to essentially go back in time to understand the origins of a present-day illness, harvesting important clues for effective treatment. Afeyan, an Armenian entrepreneur who was born in Lebanon and left the country with his family during its civil war, credits his background as an immigrant in his success and encourages others to . The news comes exactly a week afterresultsfrom Pfizer and BioNTech, which announced broadly similar results. 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. Noubar Afeyan is the founder and CEO of Cambridge, Mass. Don't call Noubar Afeyan a venture capitalist. CAMBRIDGE, Ma. The Germans took pity on them, he says. Wheres the value? Governments as well as the private sector should embrace an obligation to not only prepare for future pandemics but do everything possible to prevent viral outbreaks from becoming pandemics. 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. Early detection also offers an opportunity to radically change peoples relationship with their own health by empowering them to control their own health future with the information and the tools to preempt disease and reverse or manage a predisease condition. In biotech and VC, people were saying, the era of biotech is over, the era of the platform is over. 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. While CEO of PerSeptive, Afeyan co-founded and funded numerous other biotechnology companies, including: ChemGenics Pharmaceuticals, acquired by Millennium Pharmaceuticals in 1997; Exact Sciences (NASDAQ:EXAS), Agenus (NASDAQ:AGEN); and Color Kinetics, acquired by Philips 2007. Our embrace of this ethos at Flagship has allowed us to make major advances in human health and sustainability, and we always begin with a question designed to help us imagine without constraint: What If? However, Afeyan gained permanent residence through another route and is credited as a founder or co-founder of 38 companies. In June,Reutersreported,A series of studies in mice of Moderna Incs Covid-19 lent some assurance that it may not increase the risk of more severe disease, and that one dose may provide protection against the novel coronavirus, according to preliminary data., On July 27, 2020, theNational Institutes of Health announced, A Phase 3 clinical trial designed to evaluate if an investigational vaccine can prevent symptomatic coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in adults has begun. Its focus: T cells, a type of white blood cells that helps protect the body from infection. The firm files intellectual property claims (most ideas generate multiple patent applications) to stake out its turf and invests $1 million or $2 million max. Moderna was the first to invent the field of mRNA for therapeutics, even before the pandemic hit. In 2007, Afeyan and David Berry (inventor) co-founded Joule Unlimited, which is developing Solar Fuelsdrop-in fuels produced directly from the sun. Noubar Afeyan launched 70 companies by pushing researchers to ask what if their craziest ideas were true. 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. 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. He became chief business officer of Applera, the successor company to Perkin-Elmers life sciences business, but was soon thinking about his next move. So far, side effects are mild, flu-like symptoms. And so within days, we had designed a new vaccine and started testing it, Afeyan said, adding that its rapid but accurate. So far, three ongoing projects in biotechnology, machine learning and neuroscience have engaged three PIs and funded more than 10 researchers . Thanks to its mRNA Covid vaccine, Moderna now is a household name, with 12-month revenues north of $11 billion and a market cap approaching $100 billion. Draw a circle around what currently exists, Afeyan says, and then draw a bigger circle around whats adjacent to that. The vaccine, known as mRNA-1273, was co-developed by the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based biotechnology company Moderna, Inc., and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health. Noubar Afeyan is Founder, Senior Managing Partner and Chief Executive Officer at Flagship Ventures, a leading early stage venture capital firm. He has been a Senior Lecturer at MIT's Sloan School of . What is our reliance on reason, on safe thinking, or adjacent discovery, suppressing? (Read full essay here). How will we the survivors better the world with the new knowledge and innovation that has emerged through the necessity of crisis? Contrast this with the drug discovery paradigm weve relied on to date, which has produced important and occasionally transformative new therapies for patients, but it is ultimately a game of chance. [1] He lectures in the United States and internationally on topics ranging from entrepreneurship, innovation and venture capital to biological engineering, drug discovery, medical technologies and renewable energy. Draw a circle around what currently exists, then a bigger circle around whats adjacent to it. . Indigo Agriculture was founded in 2013 to use microbes to make seeds more productive. Noubar Afeyan, Founder and CEO, Flagship Pioneering speaks with Bloomberg's Shery Ahn at the Qatar Economic Forum, powered by Bloomberg. And, its not like the traditional flu shot. 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. If all goes well, Moderna could administer 20 million vaccine doses before the end of the year. [32][15][2], a founding angel of Foundation for Armenian Science and Technology (FAST). 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. Thats a classically big idea for Afeyan, and Repertoire has now raised more than $350 million from investors that include SoftBank and the Alaska Permanent Fund to pursue it. Updated. Noubar Afeyan fully understood those risks when he co-founded Moderna in 2010. [7] He received his B.Eng. And that reckless zone is Afeyans sweet spot because thats where the big breakthroughs will happen. At Flagship Pioneering, which he founded in 2000, Noubar has created an enterprise . Flagship's team of scientists poses scientific hypotheses, works to finesse them, and conducts proof-of-concept experiments that eventually lead to new scientific IP and companies with disruptive potential. Americans are fortunate Noubar Afeyan immigrated to the United States, and that the individuals who formed most of the leadership team at Moderna followed him to America. One example is Noubar Afeyan, a Beirut national who earned his PhD at MIT and worked on an H-1B visa before he became a US citizen. 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. Both Damiani and Andres have extensive international business experience. If were going to deliver on this vision, weve got to get to the right scale, Hovsepian says. On the other hand, the story in public markets was quite different, and 2021 was largely considered a rout for biotech: a cooling off from the coronavirus-led enthusiasm that fueled the sectors stocks in 2020. (Read full essay here). My answer no, it wasnt surprising is short on dramatic reveal, but inevitable in the era of programmable medicines. Many people believe that the process for achieving breakthrough innovations is. [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. Moderna, the first company to ship a vaccine for testing against the novel coronavirus, was founded by an immigrant. All Rights Reserved. In my philanthropic endeavors this mindset led to the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative, founded on behalf of survivors and rooted in the belief that a brighter future lies with those who are committed to helping and honoring those who have been lost. He earned a master of engineering degree from cole Centrale Paris (ECP), and came to the United States as an international student, receiving a master of science in chemical engineering from the University of Minnesota and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. Noubar Afeyan, chairman and co-founder of Moderna, joins Fareed to talk about the new Omicron coronavirus variant. This article was published last August by Forbes, Moderna made big news again on November 16. Born in Lebanon, Afeyans family left in 1975 during the Lebanese Civil War and moved to Canada, where he grew up. If you do something in parallel, you are forced to get to the essence of it, he says.
