The Best of 2025 (So Far) with Sarah Guo and Elad Gil
2025 has thus far been a year of great leaps and advances in AI technology. And Sarah and Elad have spoken with some of the most enterprising founders and scientific minds in the field of AI today. So we’re revisiting a few of our favorite conversations on No Priors so far in 2025 – Winston Weinberg (Harvey), Dr. Fei-Fei Li (World Labs), Brendan Foody (Mercor), Dan Hendrycks (Center for AI Safety), Noubar Afeyan (Flagship Pioneering), Brandon McKinzie and Eric Mitchell (OpenAI o3), Isa Fulford (OpenAI), Arvind Jain (Glen), and Dr. Shiv Rao (Abridge).
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Chapters:
00:00 – Episode Introduction
0:21 – Winston Weinberg on Leaning into New Capabilities
02:01 – Dr. Fei-Fei Li on Spatial Intelligence
04:13 – Brendan Foody on AI Disruption in the Workforce
06:10 – Dan Hendrycks on the Geopolitics of Superintelligence
08:06 – Noubar Afeyan on Entrepreneurship
10:38 – Brandon McKinzie and Eric Mitchell on Reasoning Models
12:41 – Isa Fulford on Training Deep Research
13:49 – Arvind Jain on Innovating Enterprise Search
16:21 – Dr. Shiv Rao on AI’s Human Impact
18:58 – Conclusion
#249 Brice Challamel: How Moderna is Using AI to Disrupt Modern Healthcare
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In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Brice Challamel, Head of AI Products and Innovation at Moderna, to explore how one of the world's leading biotech companies is embedding artificial intelligence across every layer of its business—from drug discovery to regulatory approval.
Brice breaks down how Moderna treats AI not just as a tool, but as a utility—much like electricity or the internet—designed to empower every employee and drive innovation at scale. With over 1,800 GPTs in production and thousands of AI solutions running on internal platforms like Compute and MChat, Moderna is redefining what it means to be an AI-native company.
Key topics covered in this episode:
How Moderna operationalizes AI at scale
GenAI as the new interface for machine learning
AI's role in speeding up drug approvals and clinical trials
The future of personalized cancer treatment (INT)
Moderna's platform mindset: AI + mRNA = next-gen medicine
Collaborating with the FDA using AI-powered systems
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(00:00) Preview
(02:49) Brice Challamel's Background and Role at Moderna
(05:51) Why AI Is Treated as a Utility at Moderna
(09:01) Moderna's AI Infrastructure
(11:53) GenAI vs Traditional ML
(14:59) Combining mRNA and AI as Dual Platforms
(18:15) AI's Impact on Regulatory & Clinical Acceleration
(23:46) The Five Core Applications of AI at Moderna
(26:33) How Teams Identify AI Use Cases Across the Business
(29:01) Collaborating with the FDA Using AI Tools
(33:55) How Moderna Is Personalizing Cancer Treatments
(36:59) The Role of GenAI in Medical Care
(40:10) Producing Personalized mRNA Medicines
(42:33) Why Moderna Doesn't Sell AI Tools
(45:30) The Future: AI and Democratized Biotech
Building the Platform for Scientific Breakthrough, with Noubar Afeyan of Moderna and Flagship Pioneering
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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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
Tal Zaks - Bridging Science, Medicine, and Returns - [Invest Like the Best, EP.406]
My guest today is Tal Zaks. Tal is a physician-scientist turned biotech executive and investor who served as Moderna's Chief Medical Officer during their COVID-19 vaccine development, giving him an extraordinary perspective on one of modern medicine's pivotal moments. His combination of medical expertise, platform innovation experience, and investing acumen allows us to explore the interconnected challenges of turning scientific breakthroughs into viable medicines while generating venture-scale returns. We dive deep into lessons from Moderna's mRNA platform, examine how emerging technologies might reshape drug development, and the fundamental question of what it means to make people healthier. For investors, entrepreneurs, and anyone interested in the future of medicine, this discussion provides a window into both the immense potential and profound challenges of advancing human health. Please enjoy my conversation with Tal Zaks.
For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.
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Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.
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Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com).
Show Notes:
(00:00:00) Welcome to Invest Like the Best
(00:08:37) State of Medicine Today
(00:09:44) Investment and Innovation in Medicine
(00:13:14) Challenges in Biotech Investment
(00:17:18) Personalized Cancer Vaccines
(00:22:58) Investing in Biotech: Process and Considerations
(00:28:38) Multidisciplinary Approach in Pharma
(00:41:35) COVID-19 Vaccine Development
(00:46:27) Funding and Manufacturing Challenges
(00:48:01) Unprecedented Vaccine Safety Measures
(00:50:38) Public Perception and Trust Issues
(00:53:54) Future of mRNA and Nucleic Acid Medicines
(00:58:04) Personalized Medicine and Data Collection
(01:04:48) AI's Role in Healthcare
(01:08:34) Investment Strategies in Therapeutics
(01:14:57) The Human Element in Medical Innovation
(01:21:58) The Kindest Thing Anyone Has Ever Done for Tal
Moderna's CFO on How to Allocate Capital in Big Pharma
The pharmaceutical space is characterized by extreme uncertainty. You never know what drugs are going to pan out. The lead time for development is extremely long. Market size is inherently unknowable. And the regulatory and pricing climate is constantly changing. So, how does a company decide where to invest its cash? On this episode, we speak with Moderna's chief financial officer, Jamey Mock, about how he views the problem. He explains the process by which the vaccine maker chooses which bets to make, how changing fortunes within the stock market affect corporate decision-making and the role of the government in accelerating progress and de-risking investment.
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Extraordinary leaps need solid foundations, part 2, w/Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel
A diverse network of collaborators is key when making scale leaps. Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel has cultivated a wide network of scientists, business leaders, and government officials across his career. When COVID-19 struck, Bancel called upon this nexus of experts to aid the warp-speed development of the mRNA-based vaccine in the race to save millions of lives.
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Extraordinary leaps need solid foundations, part 1, w/Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel
If you're launching a moonshot, success depends on how you manage the trajectory of risk. When Stéphane Bancel became Moderna's first CEO, the biotech start-up was chasing a way-out idea many experts thought was impossible. Stéphane built a culture of calculated risk-taking to create a platform for extraordinary leaps — one that enabled life-saving mRNA vaccines when Covid-19 struck.
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The breakthrough science of mRNA medicine | Melissa J. Moore
The secret behind medicines that use messenger RNA (or mRNA) is that they "teach" our bodies how to fight diseases on their own, leading to groundbreaking treatments for COVID-19 and, potentially one day, cancer, the flu and other ailments that have haunted humanity for millennia. RNA researcher Melissa J. Moore -- Moderna's chief scientific officer and one of the many people responsible for the rapid creation and deployment of their COVID-19 vaccine -- takes us down to the molecular level, unraveling how mRNA helps our bodies' proteins maintain health, prevent disease and correct errors in our genetic code. "We have entered an entirely new era of medicine," Moore says.
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Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan
In the field of bio-tech, it can take 10 years and millions of dollars to see if an experimental idea might turn into a life-saving treatment—if it ever does. Noubar Afeyan fully understood those risks when he co-founded Moderna in 2010. He and his colleagues were looking for a way to deploy the messenger RNA molecule to tackle life-threatening diseases. In January of 2020, an urgent opportunity presented itself in the form of a deadly virus that was spreading across the globe. At a breathtaking pace, Moderna produced a prototype for a COVID-19 vaccine, partnered with the NIH to test it, and produced millions of doses, becoming part of the most rapid vaccine roll-out in human history. While Moderna is the best known of Noubar's companies, he has launched many others in the bio-tech space as part of Flagship Pioneering, his multi-billion dollar venture studio.
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AI and the COVID-19 Vaccine: Moderna’s Dave Johnson
"We tend not to be a company of half measures,” notes Dave Johnson, chief data and artificial intelligence officer at Moderna, “so when we decide we’re going to do something, we’re going to do it.” This characterization certainly seems to fit the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based biotech company that made a name for itself in 2020 upon releasing one of the first COVID-19 vaccines approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for emergency use to combat the coronavirus.
In this bonus episode, Sam and Shervin learn how Moderna used artificial intelligence to speed up development of the vaccine and how the technology has helped to automate other key systems and processes to build efficiencies across the organization. Dave also describes Moderna’s digital-first culture and offers insights around collaboration that can be applied across industries. Read the episode transcript here.
Continue the conversation with us on LinkedIn at https://mitsmr.com/AIforLeaders.
We’ve created a group called AI for Leaders specifically for audience members like you. You can catch up on back episodes of the show, meet show creators and hosts, tell us what you want to hear about in Season 3, and discuss key issues about AI implementation with other like-minded people.
Me, Myself, and AI is a collaborative podcast from MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group and is hosted by Sam Ransbotham and Shervin Khodabandeh. Our engineer is David Lishansky, and the coordinating producers are Allison Ryder and Sophie Rüdinger.
Guest bio:
Dave Johnson is chief data and artificial intelligence officer at Moderna, where he is responsible for all enterprise data capabilities, including data engineering, data integration, data science, and software engineering. Johnson earned a doctorate in information physics and has more than 15 years of experience in software engineering and data science. He has spent more than a decade working exclusively in enterprise pharma and biotech companies.
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The Machine That Made the Vaccine: Company, Platform, Innovation
In this special episode of Bio Eats World -- which aired right after the FDA authorized Moderna's mRNA vaccine for emergency use -- Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel tells the story of not just the vaccine’s development, but the machine that made the vaccine: the platform, the technology, and the moves behind the vaccine’s development.
How does this new technology that uses mRNA work; why is this such a fundamental shift in the world of drug development; and where will this technology go next?
https://a16z.com/2020/12/18/moderna-covid-vaccine-mrna-technology/
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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.
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