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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Appearances
And forcing people to take vaccines is an ethical and moral consideration that the public has to buy into. And it's legitimate that they don't. And that's a hard and messy thing in a democracy. In a dictatorship, it's easy. And yes, on average, in a dictatorship, everybody gets a vaccine. No question, they'll be healthier. That being said, you now have a balance of two opposing moral forces.
And that's a reckoning that has to happen in the public square. It is not the scientists or the physicians' purview to dictate that. And I think that's where we probably overstepped. And I think my biggest learning has been the importance of the open and honest dialogue with the public on what it is that we do.
I will broaden it out to sort of nucleic acid medicines, if you will, which mRNA is an important part of. There's other types of RNA, most notably siRNA. And I think these medicines are enabling new types of pharmacology that we haven't had before. They... need a lot of investment in technology and delivery and getting them to the right tissue.
But they all benefit from the same thing we benefited from in the vaccines as a platform, which is once you get the first one right, the marginal cost for the next one is a fraction. Nucleic acids have that unique property of...
almost software-like, we used to call it in the early days of Moderna, a software-like platform, because basically it's the same physical construct of a drug, but the information in the nucleic acid, you change the information, you get out a different drug, you get out a different vaccine. But actually under a microscope, it looks exactly the same. In fact, it's the same components.
It's the information they encode that makes the drug. So these drugs as information, that's a new concept. And then there's a whole... world of opportunity in what's called gene therapy, which is the ability. I started by mentioning rare genetic diseases where somebody is born missing an enzyme or a protein.
And if you can actually just put in the information that encodes for that protein, you fix the problem. And so now physiology should reassert itself as normal physiology of any other person. You can do that in mRNA with the traditional approach. Moderna is doing that for rare diseases, but then that mRNA is transient and you need to redose every time.
But if you could actually use that mRNA as an intermediary to get in and fix the genome once and for all, then you would potentially have a long-term beneficial effect without having to redose for the entire lifetime. And the company I've been spending the last year as the acting CEO, Exilio, is doing exactly that.
It's taking this mRNA and a lipid nanoparticle, which is the same as Moderna vaccine, if you will, And conceptually, it's not the same chemistry, but then the information that's encoded in that is actually allowing that mRNA to insert itself into the nucleus and make a change forever. Now, that is going to bring a whole slew of new challenges.
One of the criticisms and the public backlash against mRNA was the mistaken conception that it will somehow change the DNA. And the truth is, mRNA does not. It can't, based on first principle, and there's no empirical evidence that anybody's ever been able to show because it can't. So mRNA doesn't do that. But there are ways to encode different information with mRNA where it will do that.
And so now we're very intentionally changing somebody's DNA to have an effect that will last for the lifetime. Well, there are some people who are going to find that challenging based on their ethical and moral framework. That's legitimate.
There's a concern for what this means for future generations and making sure that we're doing it for the individual and not with unintended consequences for their offsprings, or maybe sometimes with intended consequences. questions and ethical debates that we will have to resolve before this is widely acceptable. But at the end of that
If you can have a medicine that you take once, twice, or three times, and then you're cured for the rest of your life, as opposed to having to take an injection every two weeks, I think that's huge progress for those patients.
There's an old saying in the Talmud, which is my ethical framework given my religion, that since the time of the destruction of the temple, prophecy has been given to fools. So to the degree that I'm going to give you any prophecy, that makes me a fool. But to the degree you listen, well, that's on you. So five years is probably the easiest time.
I'm of a certain age and generation and fairly conservative in my views. So up until now, I looked at all these data collections and thought to myself, well, you know, everybody knows what it means to eat healthy and exercise more. So getting more data to tell you what you already know is actually not going to change much.
But I'm actually coming around because I do agree that I think there's a lot of differences between people in terms of what is the right intervention for them. And I think my generation of medicine is guilty with peanut buttering the effect across a population without really understanding the chunkiness of it.
I actually told my wife the other day that this is the year for me and for us to actually start collecting data in a more thoughtful manner and a much deeper level than we've done in the past. Because like most people, I go once every year or two and get the usual blood work and take my statin for a tad of high cholesterol and think I'm done.
But I think there's a whole lot more that we're going to learn that we can do. It is amazing to me, and one of the triggers is the recognition. You go and get the blood work in a hospital, and the thing that I find very depressing is the fact that if you go today into an emergency room and you get blood work,
you're gonna get the same panel that you did when I was a medical student 40 years ago, maybe with two additional analytes that have been added in the last 40 years. I find that so depressing. With all the progress we've had, and it's the same blood work. Now, here's an interesting fact.
There's a brilliant AI scientist at the Weizmann Institute called Amos Tanai, and he spent most of his career designing better proteins to make drugs and things of that nature that you would associate with AI. But he was curious to understand how much of that regular blood work variability can be trimmed if we understand you as a person better.
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