Tal Zaks
speaker
203 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Tal Zaks’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And one of the lessons I took from that failure is that this was probably not well enough funded and not given enough opportunity, either with the team structure or the financial structure or the scientific structure, to have that degrees of freedom to adjust.
And if you look at investments that have been successful, I think you're giving them some degrees of freedom and you've got a management team that has the right functions able to do that. For me, it's another learning from Moderna.
If you go back and look in the formative years of Moderna, the strategy was always to develop this technology of mRNA, understanding the engineering potential as much as the medical and biology potential.
In fact, in the early days, we were more certain of the engineering benefits than we were of the medical benefits in the sense that it wasn't clear, is this going to be optimally used for rare diseases? for oncology, for vaccines, or for something that we have yet to discover, because it was all an interplay of delivery and medicine and biology. These were the big risk factors.
Once you could engineer the mRNA, you could do it again and again and again and again. You could do it reproducibly, cheaply. That was clear. That was the engineering benefit. But what kind of medicines could you make of it? And so I think the brilliance of Stefan and that initial team before I joined was to set up enough degrees of freedom to go and explore those opportunities in parallel.
And so when it was clear early on that vaccine was the straightest shot to proving pharmacology of this technology, we went after vaccines. We didn't drop the other elements, but we made sure to have the right capital allocation strategy.
And I remember in the early days, the loudest conversations we had at the executive team around the executive table was around the relative capital deployment of these various different applications. I was fortunate to work with, I think, some of the smartest people I've ever met.
I've already mentioned Stefan, but we were at the time three physicians on the executive team, Lawrence Kim, who trained as a physician, but then became a finance executive at Goldman Sachs and joined us as our CFO. Today, he's a very successful investor in his own right.
Stephen Hogue, who's the president of the company to this day, a physician who then spent years consulting with pharma and then joined as the president of the company. And Stefan, it was a very robust dialogue of where do we invest the marginal dollar? Where do we see this technology panning out? And to take agility to the extreme.
In December of 2019, when somebody started coughing in Wuhan and that first Wall Street Journal article came, the person who in the company first picked it up was the head of the vaccines. The next person who actually took it and ran with it was Stefan himself. And he saw right from the start the importance of chasing this.
It wasn't clear to the rest of us, frankly, whether this would peter out like prior vaccines. If you remember January, February, even beginning of March of 2020, common wisdom would have had that, yeah, this is going to peter out. This is not going to be a big thing. Stefan was absolutely operating in a very different mindset.
He saw the opportunity and with his own will and management team, took the company there. And the rest, as they say, is history.
So first of all, we were very well positioned in the beginning of 2020 to get there. What most people don't realize is that by the beginning of 2020, Moderna had already tested the ability of mRNA to generate neutralizing antibodies in humans against eight different viruses. COVID was to be our ninth. And our success rate was eight out of eight, okay? That is unprecedented in drug development.
It's a function of the platform nature of this. And so if you get the antigen right, that thing you're trying to immunize against, you're gonna hit. And so we were very well prepared. And the other thing that helped us along was that we had already been collaborating with the NIH before then. So the government got to know us, BARDA and the NIH, during Zika.
People forget that, but in 2017, Zika was all the scare. So we partnered with the government. We started to develop a Zika vaccine. By the time we got there, it was of no interest. OK, but at least the NIH took notice of the rapidity and potential of this platform.
And in fact, I've told this story before, but in September of 2019, Stefan and I went down to see Tony Fauci and the NIH, and we were talking about the latest vaccine. It was something against cytomegalovirus. And Dr. Fauci looked at me and says, so what you're telling me, Tal, is you've got the best vaccine platform I've ever seen.
And with a bit of chutzpah, I said, yes, sir, and let me tell you why. And so the outcome of that meeting was twofold. Number one, the NIH wrote a paper. They published it in 2019. You can find it online with Dr. Fauci and his team citing mRNA technology as a leading platform in our readiness for pandemic. This is November of 2019.
The second thing was that we had agreed with the NIH, we would run a demonstration project where the NIH team would pick a virus, something nobody ever heard of, we haven't sequenced before, they'd send us the sequence, we'd make a quick batch, they'd test it in a phase one, and we'll start the clock and we'll see how fast we can go. That was the outcome of that meeting, and then some of the
Someone started coughing in Wuhan in December. Two months later, the rest is history. So we were well prepared as a company with a platform. And it's interesting, there was a recent economist piece on personalized cancer vaccine and how it all benefited from COVID and mRNA vaccine. What people don't realize is actually the opposite is true.
When we set out to do the personalized cancer vaccine, in order to treat somebody with cancer at a personalized dose, you have to make a small batch and you have to have a very quick turnaround time because people with cancer, they can't wait. And so we had set out years before to build a manufacturing process that would allow us to churn out a small batch in a rapid turnaround time. Guess what?
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