Building the Platform for Scientific Breakthrough, with Noubar Afeyan of Moderna and Flagship Pioneering
02/27/25 • 40 min
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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
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.
Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected]
Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @NoubarAfeyan
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
Previous Episode
Virtual Cell Models, Tahoe-100 and Data for AI-in-Bio with Vevo Therapeutics and the Arc Institute
On this week’s episode of No Priors, Sarah Guo is joined by leading members of the teams at Vevo Therapeutics and the Arc Institute – Nima Alidoust, CEO/Co-Founder at Vevo Therapeutics; Johnny Yu, CSO/Co-Founder at Vevo Therapeutics; Patrick Hsu, CEO/Co-Founder at Arc Institute; Dave Burke, CTO at Arc Institute; and Hani Goodarzi, Core Investigator at Arc Institute. Predicting protein structure (AlphaFold 3, Chai-1, Evo 2) was a big AI/biology breakthrough. The next big leap is modeling entire human cells—how they behave in disease, or how they respond to new therapeutics. The same way LLMs needed enormous text corpora to become truly powerful, Virtual Cell Models need massive, high-quality cellular datasets to train on. In this episode, the teams discuss the groundbreaking release of the Tahoe-100M single cell dataset, Arc Atlas, and how these advancements could transform drug discovery.
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Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @Nalidoust | @IAmJohnnyYu | @PDHsh | @Davey_Burke | @Genophoria
Show Notes:
0:00 Introduction
1:40 Significance of Tahoe-100M dataset
4:22 Where we are with virtual cell models and protein language models
10:26 Significance of perturbational data
17:39 Challenges and innovations in data collection
24:42 Open sourcing and community collaboration
33:51 Predictive ability and importance of virtual cell models
35:27 Drug discovery and virtual cell models
44:27 Platform vs. single hypothesis companies
46:05 Rise of Chinese biotechs
51:36 AI in drug discovery
Next Episode
National Security Strategy and AI Evals on the Eve of Superintelligence with Dan Hendrycks
This week on No Priors, Sarah is joined by Dan Hendrycks, director of the Center of AI Safety. Dan serves as an advisor to xAI and Scale AI. He is a longtime AI researcher, publisher of interesting AI evals such as "Humanity's Last Exam," and co-author of a new paper on National Security "Superintelligence Strategy" along with Scale founder-CEO Alex Wang and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. They explore AI safety, geopolitical implications, the potential weaponization of AI, along with policy recommendations.
Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected]
Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @DanHendrycks
Show Notes:
0:00 Introduction
0:36 Dan’s path to focusing on AI Safety
1:25 Safety efforts in large labs
3:12 Distinguishing alignment and safety
4:48 AI’s impact on national security
9:59 How might AI be weaponized?
14:43 Immigration policies for AI talent
17:50 Mutually assured AI malfunction
22:54 Policy suggestions for current administration
25:34 Compute security
30:37 Current state of evals
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