The Billionaire Chairman Of Vaccine Maker Moderna Wants To Reinvent Scientific Entrepreneurship

The Billionaire Chairman Of Vaccine Maker Moderna Wants To Reinvent Scientific Entrepreneurship

"I constantly say things that are unreasonable and seemingly crazy," says Noubar Afeyan, founder of venture firm Flagship Pioneering and chairman of Moderna. What if, he asked his researchers, microorganisms living in our guts–the "microbiome"–could help cure cancer? What if red blood cells could transport drugs along with oxygen? What if not all viruses were bad? And what if, he asked a decade ago, messenger RNA (mRNA) could be the basis of therapeutics? "I said, 'You're crazy, it's never going to work,'" recalls Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel of his first conversations with Afeyan about the subject in 2011. But as Afeyan, an Armenian immigrant by way of Lebanon and Canada, turned on the charm Bancel, who was then CEO of French diagnostics maker BioMérieux, relented and agreed to come to Moderna. "Noubar's genius was not trying to force the issue in my brain, but to make me think that it could change the world and that it was worth the risk," he says. 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. Afeyan, 59, is one of five billionaires associated with it, with