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cover of episode Building the Platform for Scientific Breakthrough, with Noubar Afeyan of Moderna and Flagship Pioneering

Building the Platform for Scientific Breakthrough, with Noubar Afeyan of Moderna and Flagship Pioneering

2025/2/27
logo of podcast No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

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Noubar Afeyan
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我创立 Flagship Pioneering 的初衷是将创业活动从一种随机的、依赖个体经验的活动转变为一种专业化、制度化的流程,能够平行开展多个项目。这需要将创业视为一种职业,并学习如何系统性地创建和运营公司。我坚信,创业是人类最重要的价值创造活动之一,不应该被视为一种赌博。 Flagship Pioneering 的创新方法是通过创造变异、选择和迭代的环境来实现突破性创新,这是一种涌现式创新,而非人为设计。我们不试图预测未来,而是创造一个环境,让创新自然涌现。生成式 AI 是我们实现这一目标的有力工具。 我们谨慎地将业务扩展到医疗生物技术以外的领域,例如营养、农业和气候。我们通过迭代学习来决定是否继续在某个领域投入。 面对新兴市场中的政策、公众舆论和未来不确定性等挑战,我们将其视为“不确定性”而非“风险”,并通过实验来解决不确定性,然后再去应对风险。 过去25年来,Flagship 的方法发生了变化:从最初专注于生物技术和技术的交叉点,到如今拥有更庞大的团队、更系统化的突破性创新方法,以及利用生成式 AI 加速创新,并与大型公司建立合作伙伴关系以扩大影响力。 我们认为建立平台型公司比专注于单一临床资产更重要,因为这能够应对不确定性、降低风险并提升公司生存能力。

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This week on No Priors, Sarah sits down with Noubar Afeyan, Co-founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering, the biotech firm behind groundbreaking companies like Moderna. They explore how Flagship creates the conditions for scientific breakthroughs, tackles regulatory uncertainty, and pushes the boundaries of discovery. Noubar shares insights on AI’s role in healthcare, the challenges of bringing new therapies to market, and lessons learned from past pandemics. He also discusses Flagship’s platform approach to biotech innovation and introduces the idea of polyintelligence.

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**Show Notes: **

0:00 Introduction

0:48 Founding Flagship 

5:51 Fostering environments for emergence

11:17 Expanding into new frontiers

14:26 Developing technology amid regulatory uncertainty and risk

19:12 How Flagship has evolved

22:47 AI applications in healthcare

27:30 Bottlenecks in bringing new therapies to market

32:20 Lessons for the next pandemic

34:11 Building a platform

38:10 Polyintelligence