Stéphane Bancel: The 5% Bet That Built Moderna

In 2011, Stéphane Bancel walked away from the security of leading a 6,000-person diagnostics company to join a startup of about 50 people, built on an idea most scientists had dismissed: that messenger RNA could become medicine. Almost everyone told him not to do it. He gave the bet roughly a five percent chance. Nine years later, that same bet helped the world face a pandemic in 63 days.

Stéphane Bancel is the Chief Executive Officer of Moderna. Under his leadership the company designed a COVID-19 vaccine on a computer within days of the genetic sequence being posted, delivered the first dose to a human just 63 days later, and scaled from zero manufacturing to a billion doses in twelve months. Today Moderna is building personalized cancer vaccines and using AI to reinvent how medicines are discovered and made.

This conversation sits right at the heart of what I believe about leadership. That the chief executive is really the chief energy officer. That the boldest decisions are rarely about appetite for risk, they are about the asymmetry between what you could give the world and what you could actually lose. Stéphane lives both, and he is refreshingly honest about the storms, the doubts and the mistakes along the way.

In our conversation, we explore: 
→ The five percent bet: how he weighed an enormous upside against a manageable downside, and why his wife was the only one who said yes 
→ What sailing without GPS taught him about staying calm when the storm hits, and why a storm always passes 
→ The 63-day sprint, and the Sunday phone call that saved the manufacturing of a billion doses 
→ Why he slowed a trial down so it would be a vaccine for the world, not a vaccine for white people 
→ The future he sees: personalized cancer vaccines, the human body mapped in silico, and why he calls chemotherapy tomorrow’s barbaric history

“I still believe that we have not invented yet our best drug.” Stéphane Bancel, CEO of Moderna

If you have ever faced a decision that everyone around you called too risky, this one is about how to think, and how to stay calm, when you choose to leap anyway.

🎧 Related Episodes: 

• Pascal Soriot on the purpose-led culture that transformed AstraZeneca, and the assume-good-intent principle Stéphane says he shares: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/episodes/18782083
• Satya Nadella on mission, mindset, and why the CEO has to own the technology shift: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/episodes/8966432
• Bertrand Piccard on exploration and staying comfortable in the unknown: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/episodes/14487275

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Transcript

ean-Philippe Courtois (00:00)
[upbeat music] Hello, and welcome to Positive Leadership Podcast. The podcast that helps you grow as individual, as a leader, and eventually as a global citizen. I'm Jean-Philippe Courtois. And, uh, today I'm delighted to welcome a leader who made one of the boldest bets in modern biotechnology and helped change the course of medical history. In 2011, he left the security of leading a major diagnostics company to join a fifty-person startup built around a radical idea that messenger RNA, long dismissed by many, could transform medicine. Then came 2020, [chuckles] and as a new coronavirus emerged, this team designed a vaccine within days of receiving the genetic sequence. Just sixty-three days later, the first human received a dose, which is an unprecedented scientific breakthrough, obviously. And by the end of that year, the vaccine was authorized, and billions of doses would go on to help the world confront the deadliest pandemic in a century. But his vision extends far beyond COVID. Today, Moderna is advancing personalized cancer vaccines and using AI to accelerate a new generation of therapies across infectious disease. He's been named a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur, as we say in, in French, in France. Elected also to the US National Academy of Engineering, recognized as an inventor on more than forty-five mRNA patents, if I'm correct. Yet what stands out most to me is his mindset, a deep belief in people, bold innovation, and a discipline to keep looking ahead. So Stéphane, Stéphane Bancel, CEO of Moderna, a very warm welcome to the Positive Leadership Podcast. Bienvenue au Positive Leadership Podcast, Stéphane.

Stéphane Bancel (01:46)
Merci beaucoup. Thank you very much, Jean-Philippe, for having me today. It's a pleasure.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (01:51)
So Stéphane, uh, I always start by asking some question about the background, the, the, the early, uh, bringing of my guest, and your past was anything but conventional, I think. I mean, you grew up in Marseille, uh, with a doctor mother and an engineer father. Your parents split when you were eight, I think, and your education was shaped by the Jesuits, men and women for others, [chuckles] and by your mother, who demanded excellence. So can you tell us how did those early years, and particularly your Jesuit education, your mother's as well, I think, demanding nature, and your family's culture of honesty shaped the leader you eventually became?

Stéphane Bancel (02:33)
It's a great question, Jean-Philippe, and it's true, um, that I think for all of us, at least for me for sure, those early years growing up and discovering the world and who I was and who I am, uh, were shaped by... And I think you touched on all the key of them. Maybe, maybe a new one I'll share with you.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (02:51)
Hmm.

Stéphane Bancel (02:52)
Uh, so of course, uh, my mom is very demanding, uh, which I think has stayed with me, uh, for a long time. Uh, and I think she became even more demanding once my parents divorced-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (03:03)
Mm-hmm

Stéphane Bancel (03:04)
... uh, because she was kind of felt a lot of responsibility to raising my brother and I.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (03:07)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (03:08)
Um, the Jesuits had an amazing impact on me, very profound, that I only realized maybe twenty, thirty years after.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (03:16)
Hmm.

Stéphane Bancel (03:17)
And it's for very simple reason, as you would appreciate, which is I only lived my own life.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (03:22)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (03:22)
And so given that I will go to school, you know, since, uh, sixième, so-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (03:27)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (03:27)
... middle school to a Jesuit, um, all the things we'll do in term of education, engagement of the community, helping others, and so on, just seemed normal to me-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (03:38)
[chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (03:39)
... because I knew nothing else, right?

Jean-Philippe Courtois (03:41)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (03:41)
Um, and I think this passion I have for medicine, uh, using our time on this planet to help other people through, through, through medicine, even when I was at BioMerieux, it was still the world of medicine, diagnostic, disease. Um, uh, I think... So the Jesuits had a very profound impact on me. The other big impact-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (04:00)
[chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (04:00)
... uh, that had on me that I didn't realize until maybe a few years ago is, uh, my dad used to love sailing.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (04:07)
Hmm.

Stéphane Bancel (04:08)
And he was kind of nuts. Uh, actually, they moved to Marseille from Saint-Étienne because he wanted to sail all the time.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (04:14)
[laughs] So not, not because of soccer, obviously.

Stéphane Bancel (04:16)
No. [laughs]

Jean-Philippe Courtois (04:17)
[laughs]

Stéphane Bancel (04:17)
And, uh, and it's interesting because we'll sail all the time. It'll be raining-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (04:22)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (04:22)
... outside on Christmas Day, we'll go sailing.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (04:24)
Hmm.

Stéphane Bancel (04:25)
Um, and, um, the piece I realized much later that growing up on the sailboat, it wasn't a big boat, it was a thirty, you know, ten-meter, thirty feet-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (04:34)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (04:34)
... ten-meter boat, um, taught me, uh, to enjoy adventure.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (04:41)
Mm-hmm.

Stéphane Bancel (04:41)
We always go to places we've never been before, you know.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (04:44)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (04:44)
Try to be on the med-- because there's no GPS, of course, when I was a kid.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (04:47)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (04:47)
On the med crossing to Corsica, entering during the night to look at the radio and try to do on a map the different axes-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (04:55)
[chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (04:55)
... to figure out where we were roughly. [chuckles] Um, and then because of the sea teaches you a few things. I mentioned that to my team last year-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (05:02)
Hmm

Stéphane Bancel (05:02)
... when, as you know, uh, we've had quite some challenges with-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (05:06)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (05:06)
... uh, the, uh, uh, US administration on-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (05:11)
Right

Stéphane Bancel (05:11)
... science, NIH, vaccine-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (05:14)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (05:14)
... uh, mRNA, and so on. And I told my team, I say, "Look, uh, the, the thing you learn sailing is a few things about a storm. The first thing you learn is that when there's a storm, you need to be very thoughtful, and you need to be very calm. Because overreacting is usually when people do something silly, uh, that end up-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (05:35)
Hmm

Stéphane Bancel (05:35)
... being sometime bad or very bad. And the second piece is a storm will always go away.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (05:41)
[chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (05:41)
You don't know if it's gonna be a day, in three days, uh, but the storm always end up passing. Um, and I think this, this, this side of adventure to, to be comfortable in the unknown-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (05:52)
Hmm

Stéphane Bancel (05:53)
... has been critical for me as a CEO of Moderna because as you know, there was-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (05:57)
Oh, yeah

Stéphane Bancel (05:57)
... no mRNA company before. Uh, nobody knew if mRNA was gonna work when I decided to join Moderna, when it was a one scientist company.Uh, most of my friends, uh, told me not to do it because I had a great job at Bumayes, and Bumayes is a great company.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (06:11)
Yeah. Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (06:12)
Uh, and so I think this, uh, sailing a- also taught me the sense of adventure and dealing with the unknown.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (06:18)
Hmm. Now, w- w- wonderful memories that you just shared, Stephane. I'm curious actually about any legacy as well of maybe, uh, in terms of spirituality with the Jesuits, something that, you know, sometimes people call that religious. It doesn't mean that you need to be a practitioner, but in terms of, yeah, there's something bigger out there. [laughs]

Stéphane Bancel (06:39)
Oh, for sure, and I think again, the, the passion for doing medicine is, is really helping people. Uh, I mean, some of the basic, you know, Christian beliefs, but I think it's true in most religion, which is, you know, being a good person, helping people around you-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (06:55)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (06:55)
... welcoming people, you know. Uh, all those basic, I would say, Christian teaching, again, that you see in all the big religion, uh, have had a huge impact on me. I could not see myself not doing what I'm doing. It's like, it's interesting this week, Jean-Philippe-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (07:10)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (07:10)
... at one of my weekly lunch meeting with 20 employees, uh, selected randomly just to catch up-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (07:15)
Mm-hmm

Stéphane Bancel (07:16)
... and, and, and get feedback from the team, I got, uh, asked a question that I've not been asked, uh, I think ever.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (07:21)
Hmm.

Stéphane Bancel (07:21)
And the question was like, "If you are not in life science, what would you be doing?"

Jean-Philippe Courtois (07:25)
Hmm.

Stéphane Bancel (07:26)
And I paused because it never first crossed my mind I would not be in life science.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (07:30)
[laughs]

Stéphane Bancel (07:30)
Um, and then I paused and I say, "I would be working, uh, for clean energy."

Jean-Philippe Courtois (07:35)
Ah.

Stéphane Bancel (07:35)
Uh, you know, one of the things that I've, I've done recently is I've joined the board of a, a fusion company-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (07:41)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (07:41)
... trying to make energy out of fusion. It's called Commonwealth Fusion.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (07:43)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (07:43)
It's an amazing team out of MIT.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (07:46)
Hmm.

Stéphane Bancel (07:46)
And the idea that you could do like a little sun, you know, your plasma into a factory, and create clean energy without-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (07:54)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (07:54)
... the, the, the, the, the toxic waste that we have with nuclear energy will be, of course, amazing. Uh, a glass of water will be all the energy I consume for a year, [laughs] which is kind of crazy to think about it-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (08:07)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (08:07)
... uh, including my travel, uh, by airplane, and so on.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (08:10)
Wow.

Stéphane Bancel (08:10)
And so, uh, I think th- this, this teaching from the Jesuit and this Christian teaching of doing good and helping others has, of course, had a very, very profound impact of how I think about the world.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (08:23)
Well, you're opening even new horizon. I'm not gonna open another chapter right now of your life, but it looks like [laughs] there's something there as well in terms of energy.

Stéphane Bancel (08:31)
Yeah, there is.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (08:31)
So much to be done. So much to be done.

Stéphane Bancel (08:33)
Yes, and the other one is, I think, on the philanthropic side, which I never talk about, uh-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (08:36)
Oh, I will ask you some question, no worries, because that's something of interest for me as well. [laughs]

Stéphane Bancel (08:40)
Okay, so I will wait then.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (08:41)
No, no, for, for sure. Uh, I, I, I'd like to continue discussion, Stephane, on your education. I think your education combine elite French engineering at École Centrale Paris with chemical engineering at University of Minnesota, and an MBA from Harvard. But you've said something interesting, that studying geography and history, not just sciences, was crucial to your success. So, which seems intriguing, right? When you do École Centrale Paris [laughs] engineering. So why were geography and history so important to you, and what did they teach you that pure engineering could not?

Stéphane Bancel (09:15)
So it's interesting. Um, so first, I was very bad at geography and history when I was young.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (09:20)
Okay. [laughs]

Stéphane Bancel (09:21)
Uh, because studying about the past, I thought that was not interesting. Uh, and, uh, I'm dyslexic, and so remembering, you know, geography and so on was not something easy because I was not very interested. Uh, I became interested more as an adult, and, and read a lot of books, and so on.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (09:37)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (09:37)
And geography is because geography as, as you know well, has huge impact on history.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (09:41)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (09:42)
Um, and, uh, and I, I got really the travel bug when I started working in Asia and discovering cultures and people. Um, it, it was really interesting for me as a 23-year-old living in Japan full time. I think I started to understand the French culture, the good and the bad of French culture when I was out of a French culture-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (10:04)
[laughs]

Stéphane Bancel (10:05)
... uh, by being in Japan. I also learned a lot of great thing about the Japanese culture, some-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (10:09)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (10:09)
... lots of great thing about the Japanese culture. And I really got the, the bug of discovering the world. And as you know, I lived in many countries in Europe and in the US. I think this is my fourth time living in America.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (10:20)
Wow.

Stéphane Bancel (10:21)
Um, and this time is 18 years, so it's a, a, a...

Jean-Philippe Courtois (10:25)
It's a long way.

Stéphane Bancel (10:25)
I've not done the math yet of when I would have lived more in America than, than actually in France. Um, and so, um, history is interesting because it teaches you how to think about things and how to think about humans, because-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (10:42)
Hmm

Stéphane Bancel (10:42)
... at the end of the day, business is a group of people working together-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (10:47)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (10:47)
... to do something for other people. Uh, and, and the human interaction, the human psychology, I think, is something very important and very interesting, and I think you can, uh, learn a lot from it through history. Uh, I love business, and so I got into learning about business history, how company were built 1500 years ago.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (11:05)
Hmm.

Stéphane Bancel (11:05)
Uh, as I like-- as I talk about AI to my team to remind them that there were companies operating before there was electricity. I know it's hard for most people to even think about it-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (11:15)
[laughs]

Stéphane Bancel (11:15)
... but the railroad companies were built, you know, across countries-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (11:19)
Right

Stéphane Bancel (11:19)
... when the, the steam engine was discovered and invented. Uh, there was no electricity, so everything was written on paper, on notebooks.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (11:27)
That's right. Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (11:28)
You couldn't pick up a phone and call somebody or send an email.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (11:30)
Hmm.

Stéphane Bancel (11:30)
But those massive national enterprise still were run, most probably we'll see today, very inefficiently, but they were run.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (11:37)
[laughs]

Stéphane Bancel (11:37)
So I think there's a lot of interesting thing about history that can be used in every day. And so as you think about where the world is going-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (11:44)
Hmm

Stéphane Bancel (11:44)
... because I think as a leader of a company, I need to-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (11:46)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (11:46)
... spend a lot of time thinking about where the world is going, the world in general, and the world of life science and medicine in particular, of course.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (11:53)
Yeah. Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe quickly because, uh, you make me think, of course, of a bigger question, Stephane. As a, as a leader of a very global company by, by design, in a way, when a virus gets born, and of course, we, we got some news recently in terms of a new virus [laughs] with the antivirus-Do you see the world more actually decentralized, more deglobalized with pe-- some people would say? How would you call the world we are going through right now, like, over the last few years?

Stéphane Bancel (12:24)
Yes, I think the world has, a-as you know, many more tensions than we used to have five, 10 years ago. The, the world is much more polarized. I think personally that technology has played a big role in that polarization that-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (12:39)
Mm

Stéphane Bancel (12:39)
... some politicians have exploited. Um, on some part, there is more collaboration.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (12:46)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (12:46)
And I see some pockets of more collaboration than two or five years ago. And then some parts of the world where there's much less collaboration than we used to have 20 years ago-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (12:55)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (12:55)
... which seems a bit crazy because one would think almost linearly about where the world is going. Uh, and actually-- and again, you go back to history, you see that through history where you have those phases of huge step forward and then step backward and then huge step forward. Humans have not evolved on this planet in a linear fashion, and I think we're just at another moment where this is happening.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (13:13)
Yeah. Agree with you. So let's come back to your kind of your learning path because, uh, back to your studies, you, you then made a really unconventional move after getting your chemical engineering degree. You took a sales job, I think at bioMérieux, right, in Asia Pacific, instead of an engineering role. So why sales? I'm intrigued. I've been myself a salesman for most of my life, [chuckles] so I, I love it obviously.

Stéphane Bancel (13:38)
Mm.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (13:38)
But most engineers would never consider th-that path. What did you see that others did not see actually?

Stéphane Bancel (13:44)
So it's interesting. So you're correct. I started as a, as... in, in sales and marketing. Um, I thought it was really interesting to learn how do you serve a customer because at the end of the day, in any business, and I love businesses, and I don't see myself doing anything but working in companies, you are here to serve customer, whether it's a product or service.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (14:05)
Hmm.

Stéphane Bancel (14:06)
And being at the interface, I think teaches you a lot. And so I wanted early in my career to have that experience. I was very lucky that, uh, Alain Mérieux and the team at bioMérieux allowed me to do that because it's not the linear path. Um, and I've learned a lot, which by the way made me realize that I didn't know much about business that I went to business school.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (14:24)
[chuckles] Yes. So in 2011, you are the successful, uh, CEO of bioMérieux, right? At the time, six thousand employees, but billions in revenue.

Stéphane Bancel (14:35)
Mm.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (14:35)
Recognized as one of the top biotech CEOs in the world at 39. Then Noubar Afeyan called about a tiny startup working on mRNA, a technology that had never produced an approved drug. Take us to that moment, Stéphane, when you told your wife you are considering joining that onesie company, Moderna, [chuckles] and she asked about the chances of success. I think you, you said, uh, around 5%. So why did you say yes? [chuckles] What convinced you to take that enormous risk?

Stéphane Bancel (15:09)
So it's interesting. Um, as I told you, a lot of my friends and family members told me not to do it, except actually my wife-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (15:17)
Uh-huh

Stéphane Bancel (15:17)
... told me to do it.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (15:18)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (15:18)
And my wife is interesting. Um, she's not a scientist at all. She's a photographer, creative-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (15:25)
Hmm

Stéphane Bancel (15:25)
... person by background, and, and now she's running our philanthropy, uh, full time. But she got very excited about how I was describing medicine that we could do, especially for kids with genetic disease using mRNA.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (15:38)
Yep.

Stéphane Bancel (15:39)
And, and as I was describing all the challenges, and this is where the 5% came as a-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (15:45)
Uh-huh

Stéphane Bancel (15:45)
... very low odds of this working, um, she actually told me, "You have to do it." And I looked at her puzzled. I said, "What do you mean I have to do it?" [both chuckling] She's like, "You are so, uh, relentless and bold and stubborn," she added, [chuckles] uh-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (16:03)
[chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (16:03)
... "that i-if it's gonna be that hard or, or that improbable of working, you will, you will find a path. You will get around you the right people-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (16:15)
[chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (16:15)
... the right team. You will set a culture of relentlessness. You are so obsessed about," again, going back to a Jesuit priest doing-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (16:22)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (16:22)
... good for the world, good for people, "you will find a path. Um, and so you have to do it." Uh, which became an interesting [chuckles] moment in our marriage where it's like, "Shit, I think this is crazy."

Jean-Philippe Courtois (16:33)
[laughs]

Stéphane Bancel (16:33)
Everybody around me tell me I should not do it, all my coaches, mentor-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (16:38)
Except my wife. [chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (16:38)
Except my wife. Uh, who by the way doesn't-- is not a business person and doesn't understand science. I'm like, "Okay." Uh, but I think she had, she had the, the key essence of the mission of the company at heart-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (16:47)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (16:47)
... from day one. And then the reason why I decided to do it is it became very clear, if you look at the history of the biotech industry-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (16:55)
Mm-hmm

Stéphane Bancel (16:55)
... the biotech industry, Jean-Philippe, as you know, was started by-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (16:58)
Yep

Stéphane Bancel (16:58)
... Genentech and Amgen in the '70s.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (17:00)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Stéphane Bancel (17:00)
And if you look today, most of the drugs that are the most impact in cancer or think about the GLPs or anything you want, they all are biologics products.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (17:09)
Mm.

Stéphane Bancel (17:10)
They come from a biotech technology, biotech industry, that-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (17:12)
Yep

Stéphane Bancel (17:12)
... those two companies started 50 years ago. And so I use the biotech industry as a mental model to say, "Look, if we can make mRNA work, and you take a 30, 40, 50-year arc, and you-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (17:23)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (17:23)
... think about what medicine you could do, uh, you cannot even think about the medicine that you could do." Uh, you know, we had a town hall last week with our team after our Q1 earning call, and I closed by telling them, "I still believe that we have not invented yet our best drug."

Jean-Philippe Courtois (17:38)
[chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (17:39)
Despite we having amazing drugs-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (17:41)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (17:41)
... including what we did during the pandemic for COVID, I don't think we've invented our best drugs. Uh, and so as I thought about this arc of innovation and medicine-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (17:51)
Yep. Yep

Stéphane Bancel (17:51)
... and the impact it could have on, on people around the planet, I'm like, "You have to do it because-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (17:56)
[chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (17:57)
... even the upside is so big for the world-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (18:00)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (18:00)
... that if the downside is we're gonna lose some investors' money, and I'm gonna have to find a new job because we were bankrupt and help my team find a new job, that's a very manageable downside."

Jean-Philippe Courtois (18:10)
Yes.

Stéphane Bancel (18:10)
And the asymmetry was so gigantic between the upside and the very manageable downside that, uh, it ended up being a very easy decision.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (18:18)
I see. Well, it looks like it was almost like a calling, Stéphane, like a vocation-

Stéphane Bancel (18:23)
Almost, yeah

Jean-Philippe Courtois (18:24)
...coming through. Almost, right? [chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (18:25)
Yes. And it became even more after, which is interesting, because it was more intuitive initially.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (18:30)
Yes.

Stéphane Bancel (18:30)
And as I learned more about the technology and I saw what the team was inventing and how we were going through the S-curve, and the technology was i-improving very quickly and so on, it became, yeah, it became almost a calling, yeah.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (18:42)
So you said that the key insight was that mRNA could access two-third of human biology that traditional drugs could not reach, proteins inside cells or on cell membranes. Can you explain that in simple terms for listeners who are from very div-diverse backgrounds? What made you so certain that this was the right best-- the right bet, sorry, despite those odds, actually?

Stéphane Bancel (19:06)
Sure. So to do very simple biology, uh, we have around twenty-two thousand genes in our DNA, so instructions for twenty-two thousand proteins.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (19:15)
Yep.

Stéphane Bancel (19:15)
And a third of those proteins are called secreted protein, think about insulin, where they're made inside the cell, like your pancreas, from your DNA instruction.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (19:25)
Mm-hmm.

Stéphane Bancel (19:26)
And once they're made inside the pancreas, they are secreted, they are delivered outside of the cells of a pancreas, and they go into your bloodstream, do their business.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (19:34)
Okay.

Stéphane Bancel (19:34)
Well, two-third of the protein in every cell are to make your cell function. Think about your cell like a, a town-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (19:42)
Mm-hmm

Stéphane Bancel (19:42)
...with a lot of different jobs. You have a police-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (19:44)
Yep

Stéphane Bancel (19:44)
...you have fire people and educators. That's what a cell does. It has a lot of jobs. And to keep the cell living, two-third of a protein in that cells never leave the cell.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (19:54)
Mm-hmm.

Stéphane Bancel (19:55)
And so if you make a, a protein in, in a bacteria like the biotech industry does or-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (20:00)
Yep

Stéphane Bancel (20:00)
...your cell for, let's say, cancer or insulin for diabetes, when you inject it, it stays inside the blood, it goes turn around. It doesn't-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (20:09)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (20:09)
...go inside human cells. And so the entire world of protein staying inside cells is just unaddressable-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (20:16)
Mm

Stéphane Bancel (20:16)
...undoable using recombinant biotech technology. And so because in the case of mRNA, the protein-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (20:23)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (20:23)
...is made inside the cells, once we bring the mRNA we make in the factory inside your cell, like we did for COVID-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (20:30)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (20:30)
...uh, we are right there, and so we can make any protein inside the cells as we want, which is the fun part of the science.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (20:36)
Well, thanks for opening our eyes and our brains about the potential of those two-thirds. Now let's dig into it. I mean, January twenty twenty, I'm sure that's a time of day to-- you still remember vividly. You're on vacation in South of France, maybe close to Marseille, I don't know, you're gonna tell us, [chuckles] reading the Wall Street Journal before sunrise, and you see reports of a pneumonia in Wuhan. And at Davos, I was there actually in Davos at the time, [chuckles] people show you data on their phones, human-to-human transmission, rides to a-- flights, sorry, to every corner of the world. You return to your hotel and think, "This is not SARS. It's going to be the nineteen eighteen flu pandemic." So take us inside that moment. What did you see that others didn't see at the time, and what did you do next?

Stéphane Bancel (21:25)
Sure. So, um, it's interesting to go back in time. So, um, I, I was made aware of a virus, as you said, during the Christmas break by reading the newspaper. Um, I reached out to Tony Fauci's team at the National Institutes of Health in the US, the NIH.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (21:43)
Yep.

Stéphane Bancel (21:44)
And they were monitoring the situation. They clearly were aware already before, uh, the news-- [chuckles] the report of Wall Street Journal was aware, uh, and they were monitoring. And when the sequence, the genetic instruction of a virus, was put online in early January, we started to prepare a product to put a clinical trial because I thought, like everybody at the time, it was gonna be like SARS or MERS or a local outbreak, and then it will go away.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (22:07)
Mm.

Stéphane Bancel (22:07)
But I wanted to prove to ourselves, to myself and to Tony Fauci, that we could go in a clinic i-in sixty days, which was what I told him before in twenty nineteen, that he didn't believe me, could be done because when SARS happened, it took the NIH, Tony had told me, twenty months to go to the clinic.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (22:29)
Mm-hmm. Oh.

Stéphane Bancel (22:30)
Uh, and when I told him we could do it in two months, of course, he didn't believe the guy with French funny accent.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (22:35)
[chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (22:35)
Um, plus I'm not even a biologist, not even a PhD, so think about it, what credibility do I have-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (22:40)
Yep, yep

Stéphane Bancel (22:40)
...to make such claims? And so my goal at the time in mid-January was, let's get a vaccine made with a sequence that was just published by the Chinese online.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (22:50)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (22:51)
And Tony Fauci will run the clinical trial. We will have proven we can, in case something really bad happen one day-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (22:56)
Mm

Stéphane Bancel (22:56)
...do that in sixty days. Um, and then I'm in Davos, and I'm monitoring the cases on my laptop. I build an Excel spreadsheet by country.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (23:05)
Yep.

Stéphane Bancel (23:05)
And the, the R0, you know, the, the-- that everybody has learned now, which is the, the, the, the, the, the pace of, of co-, uh, contamination of people-to-people transmission-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (23:16)
Yep

Stéphane Bancel (23:16)
...seems very, very high. And as I spent time in Davos with a few people, including Jeremy Farrar, who is now the chief scientific officer of the WHO-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (23:26)
Mm-hmm

Stéphane Bancel (23:26)
...he was running the Wellcome Trust before. It becomes very clear that the R0 is very, very different from SARS or MERS.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (23:34)
Mm.

Stéphane Bancel (23:34)
And then the piece, as we discussed with Jeremy, because we would meet a couple times a day between meeting at Davos just to catch up.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (23:40)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (23:40)
So a few things then happen. On a Wednesday of Davos, I don't know if you remember, the Chinese government decide to close Wuhan.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (23:47)
Right.

Stéphane Bancel (23:48)
And I'm like, "Geez, what do the Chinese know that we don't know?" Because you don't close a city like this, and it's not a small city, Wuhan. I know most people in France or elsewhere had not heard of Wuhan before.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (23:57)
Yep.

Stéphane Bancel (23:57)
But Wuhan is a very big industrial city.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (23:59)
Yep.

Stéphane Bancel (24:00)
Uh, and then one other thing I had done at Davos when I started to get more and more worried is I'd look at all the flights leaving Wuhan, direct flights.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (24:08)
Hmm.

Stéphane Bancel (24:09)
And I had to realize that every capital in Asia had direct flights from Wuhan-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (24:12)
Wow

Stéphane Bancel (24:12)
...every capital in Europe, and every big cities on the West Coast of the US.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (24:16)
[chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (24:17)
And as I look at the R0-And the incubation time, which, you know, was estimated at the time seven to 10 days, and the travel and number of flights. So I went back in time, even to when I-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (24:26)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (24:26)
... I read the article between Christmas and New Year, and just calculate how many people could have been contaminated with no symptoms, and have left Wuhan.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (24:35)
Yes.

Stéphane Bancel (24:35)
And the number was so gigantic that it became very clear that this was gonna be like 1918, which again, connecting the dots why studying history is helpful-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (24:46)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (24:46)
... because I knew how bad 1918 had been when we had the Spanish flu, which by the way-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (24:51)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (24:51)
... didn't come from Spain, poor Spanish. Uh-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (24:53)
[laughs]

Stéphane Bancel (24:54)
... came out of Russia. Um-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (24:56)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (24:56)
... and so, and so that's the week where I pivoted, uh, Wednesday or Thursday night, I forgot now, of that-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (25:03)
Uh-huh

Stéphane Bancel (25:03)
... that, that was week, to realize this is gonna be like 1918, and I need to change my plan because my old plan is wrong.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (25:11)
Is obsolete. Yeah, yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (25:13)
Yeah.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (25:13)
And so, as you said, I think it was 63 days later, right? After that genetic sequence was posted online that the first human received a dose, which is 10 times faster than any vaccine in history. Can you actually lead us through your organization? Uh, how did you do that to accomplish something that never happened before in such a record time?

Stéphane Bancel (25:37)
Yes. So I would say there's some pieces that are linked to the technology. Uh-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (25:43)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (25:43)
... that has nothing to do with my organization, it's just mRNA. Uh-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (25:47)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (25:47)
... and a piece of what we had built, so a, a few things. So mRNA, because it's an information molecule, I can make an mRNA vaccine on the computer in two minutes-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (25:56)
Mm

Stéphane Bancel (25:56)
... as long as I have a sequence. I literally copy and paste it-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (25:59)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (25:59)
... to a cassette that we built before. And we had done, which most people didn't know, nine vaccine in clinical trial before-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (26:07)
Mm

Stéphane Bancel (26:07)
... uh, January 2020.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (26:09)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (26:09)
So we have done a lot of different constructs. Never a coronavirus, but we've done flu, Zika, a few other-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (26:14)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (26:14)
... other viruses. And then the other piece we had done for cancer, which is why this platform is so interesting because you can connect-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (26:20)
Mm

Stéphane Bancel (26:20)
... the dots in ways that are science fiction, like for traditional pharma. For our cancer treatment, which I hope we can talk about, uh, uh, in a moment-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (26:29)
Yes. Right

Stéphane Bancel (26:30)
... uh, we had had to develop a manufacturing machine to do individualized product for one human at a time.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (26:39)
Hmm. Wow.

Stéphane Bancel (26:39)
So we shrunk everything-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (26:40)
[laughs]

Stéphane Bancel (26:41)
... and we also shrunk the cycle time, the time it takes to make product. And so we basically use a cancer machine to make the entire lot.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (26:50)
Hmm.

Stéphane Bancel (26:50)
Because in the vaccine, the dose are much lower per human than in cancer.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (26:54)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (26:54)
So you could make for the 60 or 70 people of a phase one study, you could make the entire batch.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (27:00)
Hmm.

Stéphane Bancel (27:00)
And that process I knew could take 30 days. So it took us-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (27:03)
Hmm

Stéphane Bancel (27:03)
... around 30 days from mid-January we got the sequence to make the product.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (27:07)
Yeah. The first batch.

Stéphane Bancel (27:07)
And then it was the 30 days for the FDA to review the file-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (27:11)
[laughs]

Stéphane Bancel (27:11)
... to authorize Tony Fauci's team to start dosing human with a green-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (27:15)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (27:15)
... light from the FDA.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (27:17)
But I think then really come the real problem, or the real problem, another problem. You didn't have the money to manufacture the vaccine at scale, and I think your head of manufacturing could not buy the ingredients. So probably one of the scariest moment of, of your career, I guess, which is, you know, what was going in your mind actually? You had the vaccine design, but you could not afford to make it. So how did you navigate that storm coming back to your storm on the sailboat? [laughs]

Stéphane Bancel (27:44)
Yeah. And that was a long storm. It was a couple month storm, um, where-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (27:48)
Hmm

Stéphane Bancel (27:50)
... I tried everywhere I could to raise money. I talked to every big foundation in the world, didn't get a penny.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (27:58)
[laughs]

Stéphane Bancel (27:58)
The biggest one, I called them three, four, five times. I even told them, "I will put a factory just for low-income countries, but please help me."

Jean-Philippe Courtois (28:06)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (28:06)
Got not a penny.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (28:07)
Nothing.

Stéphane Bancel (28:08)
Um, I asked big pharma company, um, all the big vaccine players, they decided not to work with us.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (28:15)
[laughs]

Stéphane Bancel (28:16)
Um, and what actually ended up saving us, which is an interesting candlelight, um-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (28:22)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (28:22)
... on the, the, the capitalism system, um, it's actually it's a public market who saved me.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (28:28)
Wow.

Stéphane Bancel (28:28)
So what happened in May 2020, uh, we knew the clinical data were coming over phase one.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (28:35)
Mm-hmm.

Stéphane Bancel (28:36)
Um, and because we couldn't find money anywhere, big pharma not helping, f- uh, foundations not helping us.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (28:43)
Foundation either. Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (28:44)
Uh, the government was starting in the US to help us because in the meantime, Congress had passed, uh, some budget for clinical trial.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (28:53)
Hmm.

Stéphane Bancel (28:53)
So the US was helping us, as has been well documented. We got more than a billion dollar from the US government to pay-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (28:59)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (28:59)
... for the clinical studies-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (29:00)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (29:00)
... to be able to accelerate them without taking any safety risk for the population and the people in the study. But what was not part, because your players were all big companies, was manufacturing and buying machines, buying raw material, and so on. And so when we got the phase one data in early May 2020, we went to the capital market to make a, a raise.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (29:22)
Mm.

Stéphane Bancel (29:22)
And one of the amazing thing that happened is, uh, Morgan Stanley was one of our bank, and James Gorman, the then CEO, he's retired now of Morgan Stanley, called me on a Sunday and said, "You cannot waste time on a roadshow. Your vaccine is working. The team had told me you're gonna do a fundraising and a roadshow next week. You cannot. It's a waste of your time. The bank will buy everything."

Jean-Philippe Courtois (29:45)
Wow.

Stéphane Bancel (29:45)
I'm like, "What?"

Jean-Philippe Courtois (29:47)
Wow. [laughs]

Stéphane Bancel (29:47)
And he's like, "But you know, James, it's more than, uh, $1.3, $1.4 billion." He's like, "I know." He's like, "We'll buy everything. We'll put it on our bank balance sheet, and then we will resell it to investors. We might make a gain, we'll make a loss. It's not the point. The point is you cannot waste a week on a roadshow."

Jean-Philippe Courtois (30:02)
Wow.

Stéphane Bancel (30:02)
"It would be criminal now that you have a, the first vaccine that seems to be working in the clinic, given we are living a pandemic." And Morgan Stanley, and I've said that story many times-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (30:10)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (30:10)
... and James is a, is a gentleman. Morgan Stanley, uh, basically took the entire... When the market closed on Monday at 4:01-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (30:18)
Hmm

Stéphane Bancel (30:18)
... we signed the, the transaction. They, they, they, they got everything. All the stock, we got all the cash.And then, and then we were able to use that capital to buy machine, uh, to buy raw material, to hire people-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (30:31)
[chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (30:31)
... so we could scale manufacturing. 'Cause I think the media has done an amazing job during two thousand and twenty to cover all the different vaccine by all the companies.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (30:38)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (30:39)
But what the media has never really done is a story-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (30:41)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (30:42)
... about the incredible industrial challenge, which was to go from no manufacturing capacity-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (30:48)
[chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (30:48)
... to a billion dose in 12 months. That was incredible, and the team did it. It's really even more remarkable than getting a vaccine out of the door in a year, I think.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (30:57)
No, I think it's an amazing story. And, in a way, you just called that as well because we don't, we don't necessarily talk much about finance, invest, you know, uh, investing into, uh... Well, I'm not even calling that a pr- it's not a private equity, but really a, a bet, a huge-

Stéphane Bancel (31:12)
Mm-hmm

Jean-Philippe Courtois (31:13)
... health human bet.

Stéphane Bancel (31:14)
Right.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (31:15)
And that call was pretty amazing. The way you describe it is like, okay, this guy made a very principled decision on behalf of his [chuckles] organization, which was not necessarily backed up, I'm sure, by many of his shareholders, but he just bet, bet on you and Moderna, and, and you did it. So, so that's-

Stéphane Bancel (31:30)
Yeah, which is also fascinating, to build on your point, because again, as I said, big foundations around the world said no.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (31:36)
Yeah. Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (31:37)
Which you would think a foundation, there's a pandemic, people dying, they're gonna be helpful. Said no.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (31:41)
Mm-hmm.

Stéphane Bancel (31:41)
Uh, and big pharmaceutical companies that were the biggest players in vaccine in the space said no as well.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (31:46)
Wow.

Stéphane Bancel (31:46)
And it's a cap- it's a public bucket and a bank who helped us.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (31:50)
[chuckles] So continuing on this story and accelerating a bit on this one, St- uh, Stéphane, in July 2020, you started your phase III trial, but you are not enrolling, I think, enough people from diverse backgrounds, African Americans, Latinos, the communities that were, I think, and you c- you can correct me, most impacted by COVID, and you made a painful decision to slow down enrollment to ensure that trial was representative, which, um, must, must have been, I think, I'm sure, an agonizing choice with people dying every day. So what values guided you to make that call, which I'm sure was not necessarily, uh, popular among others people?

Stéphane Bancel (32:28)
Yeah, it's a great point. It was most probably the most difficult decision I made in 2020. It was very painful. We, we debated it for around a week, and then we're like, "We cannot keep debating. We need to decide on..."

Jean-Philippe Courtois (32:39)
[chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (32:39)
Uh, it's exactly what you described, which is as we're getting the data on the trial, not the clinical data, but the representation of a study, which is something-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (32:48)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (32:48)
... every company gets. We had mostly white people, to be simple.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (32:53)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (32:53)
Uh, and because we wanted this vaccine to be a vaccine for the world, uh, not a vaccine for white people, uh, there's a lot of things about the human body and human health we don't understand collectively around different genetic background, different representation, and it was really important for us that this would be a vaccine for the world, not a vaccine for white people. And so we decided to slow down, and the way we slow down is we tell, we told some site we are recruiting mostly white people. You cannot-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (33:19)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (33:19)
... get any more people into the study, and we added new site-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (33:23)
Hmm

Stéphane Bancel (33:23)
... in communities where there were people of color. Uh, it was, it was agonizing. It was even more agonizing at the end, 'cause as you say, people were dying.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (33:32)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (33:32)
And then, you know, we end up having a product approved one week before Pfizer, and they already twisted it in our, in our back saying they were the first product approved and so on, and we are ahead in that race. But it was the right thing to do. Again, in the end of the day, you have to live with yourself and your decisions. I'm very happy with the decision I made. I hope I would make the same decision again if it was presented to me because at the end of the day, it was-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (33:53)
[clears throat]

Stéphane Bancel (33:53)
... me and the team debating it, and we were bold because it became, at some stage, a bold discussion with my recommendation to slow down because it-- we wanted this to be a vaccine for the world, not for white people.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (34:04)
No, wonderful decision, very principled decision, and fantastic, uh, Stéphane. Uh, and we'll come back in a few minutes to another question when it comes to another, I think, big issue for, for medicine and pharmas, which is global access, obviously, to health in the world. I'll come back to that. But now I'd like to shift the discussion a little bit to cancer, which obviously is something you've been actively working on. mRNA cancer vaccine represent one of the most exciting frontiers in medicine, and the concept is extraordinary. Uh, so your melanoma vaccine in, in tisneran, uh, developed with Merck, uh, I think is now in phase III, uh, trials and showing a forty-nine percent, if I'm correct, reduction in recurrence risk, and your, and your Marlborough factory advanced automation, robotics delivers a personalized vaccine in under thirty days from tumor sequencing to treatment. Can you help our listeners again understand in simple, in a simple way how personalized cancer vaccines work, and what makes this approach so revolutionary, of course, compared to the traditional cancer treatment we still have today?

Stéphane Bancel (35:14)
Sure. So I'm gonna try to be very sim-simple, and any doctor or scientist who listen to me might have a few goosebump, and I apologize in advance. So basically, we all have cancer cells in our body all the time of our life, and if we are healthy, which is why sleeping and sport and eating well and so on are so important, your immune system-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (35:35)
Mm

Stéphane Bancel (35:35)
... which basically lives in your blood and goes around your body, will see that first cancer cell and will eat it. Again, massive simplification, but that what's happen.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (35:43)
Yes. Yes.

Stéphane Bancel (35:45)
I-If a cancer can grow because, for example, you spend a period of your time, you have a d-- you go through a divorce, you have a, a big trauma in your life-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (35:54)
Mm-hmm

Stéphane Bancel (35:54)
... where you don't sleep for a month or two, you see sometimes five, ten years after, you probably having cancer.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (35:59)
[chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (35:59)
But it started at that moment. So if your cancer grows, your immune system becomes blind to it because it be- becomes used to it. It's part of-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (36:07)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (36:07)
... the environment, and it doesn't fight your cancer anymore. So what we developed is a technology at Moderna where we basically take a sequence of your tumor, meaning we take a biopsy of your tumor-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (36:21)
Mm-hmm

Stéphane Bancel (36:21)
... and we read all the letters of the DNA of your tumor, the three gigabytes of letter. We do the same on a, a, a draw of blood to get the DNA of a healthy cell of your body, so we can know what is Jean-PhilippeUh, uh-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (36:35)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (36:35)
... DNA

Jean-Philippe Courtois (36:36)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (36:36)
And we compare via informatics-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (36:39)
Mm-hmm

Stéphane Bancel (36:39)
... all the mutation where all the letters has changed-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (36:42)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (36:42)
... in your cancer cell compared to your healthy cell. And then through our software, we pick the 34 mutation that we think, based on biological rules and medicine rules-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (36:51)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (36:51)
... are the most relevant. And we make one mRNA-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (36:54)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (36:54)
... with all those 34 mutation in one molecule in a factory in 30 days.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (36:58)
Wow.

Stéphane Bancel (36:59)
And when we inject it in your arm in your, your hospital, what we've shown is after around four dose, because remember, your immune system missed the, the, the mutation-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (37:08)
Yep

Stéphane Bancel (37:08)
... in your cancer. After around four dose, we start to see your immune system recognizing your cancer. It's waking up to your cancer-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (37:15)
[chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (37:16)
... and it starts eating it. And so the data, as you said, are quite incredible, that we've showed in the five-year survival study of a phase two. The phase three is coming soon. We are now in lung cancer, in pancreas, in bladder cancer, kidney, and many, many cancer type in clinical studies. And the uniqueness is because mRNA, again, is an information medicine, it allowed us during COVID to flip very quickly to make a designer vaccine on the computer. That same technology allows us, if you and I get diagnosed having skin cancer the same day by the same doctor in any hospital of the world-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (37:48)
Yep

Stéphane Bancel (37:48)
... we make a molecule for Jean-Philippe. We'll make a different molecule for Stéphane.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (37:52)
For you.

Stéphane Bancel (37:52)
That in each case is adapted 100%, like a hand to a glove of the right size-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (37:57)
[chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (37:58)
... to your tumor and to my tumor.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (38:00)
So is the envision, Stéphane, that at the end of the day, you'll be producing billions of dose, but one dose at a time for one person, one individual on the planet to cure cancer?

Stéphane Bancel (38:11)
That's correct. That's, that's the way.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (38:12)
That's correct. Wow.

Stéphane Bancel (38:12)
And our biggest vision is to go actually much earlier in cancer. We just announced last week we are starting a lung study, but we've already done lung study that's ongoing for people with stage three and stage four disease, so advanced disease.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (38:27)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (38:27)
We're gonna start our first stage one, uh, testing, because in lung cancer, you can find cancer early if you do an X-ray of a former smoker.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (38:35)
Mm-hmm.

Stéphane Bancel (38:35)
You can find the cancer early, and we think that would be even more powerful because there's less disease.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (38:41)
Yes.

Stéphane Bancel (38:41)
And there's also, you have a stronger immune system. Uh, and so the thing we're trying to do in Moderna is to go as early as we can in disease and also to prevent disease. We have also another product, uh, that's gonna start a clinical study in the UK at Oxford any week now. That is for people that have Lynch syndrome. You have one in front of people that don't know, but they have mutation in their DNA that increase-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (39:04)
Mm-hmm

Stéphane Bancel (39:04)
... tremendously their chance of having colon cancer. And so in that case, where they will bring yet another product, where we're gonna give you instruction so that-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (39:12)
Hmm

Stéphane Bancel (39:12)
... the cancer will not develop, so it's a prevention-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (39:15)
Prevention

Stéphane Bancel (39:15)
... of cancer. So there's a lot of things that we're able to do with this technology because a- as I said, it's an information technology in your body.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (39:24)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (39:24)
And, uh, life is information, and so we can, as the world learns more about disease and mechanism of disease, we can then very quickly make new, new tools to fight disease.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (39:33)
No, it's, it's amazing, and also incredibly exciting to think about the opportunity for, for the world. And coming back to the, the s- kind of the challenge you had with COVID, right? In terms of manufacturing. That must be mind blogging, [chuckles] mind bo- mind-boggling, sorry, in, in a sense, again, of all those individual doses produced. So how are you solving mani-- that manufacturing puzzle?

Stéphane Bancel (39:57)
Yeah. So we are trying to scale out, uh, the process by shrinking everything. So if you were to go and visit our Marlborough factory in Massachusetts in the US-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (40:09)
[chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (40:09)
... what you will see is a lot of engineers trying to shrink everything smaller and smaller and smaller.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (40:16)
[chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (40:17)
Because if I can make more per square foot on the floor or meter square or square meter-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (40:21)
Yeah, yeah

Stéphane Bancel (40:22)
... and I can do more 24/7, this is how I improve my output. The team has already reduced compared to what we used for phase two study to what we are now ready to go commercial, because, uh, we are hoping to get the data this year and to launch a product next year in '27.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (40:37)
Mm-hmm.

Stéphane Bancel (40:37)
We've already reduced by 10X the size on the floor, and the team has a roadmap for another 10X.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (40:43)
Wow.

Stéphane Bancel (40:44)
So of course, that will be 100X.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (40:45)
Yeah, yeah. [clears throat]

Stéphane Bancel (40:47)
Um, and we're trying to also shrink the manufacturing time because if I can do something in one day versus five days-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (40:52)
[chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (40:53)
... uh, of course I can do five more, five times more, right? This is basic math.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (40:56)
Yes. Yeah, yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (40:56)
And so we're just obsessed about the output and think what are all the variables we have? That's why being an engineer comes handy.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (41:02)
[chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (41:02)
What are all the variables we have in term of improving the output? And we're working on all of them in parallel at the same time.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (41:09)
That's amazing. It makes me think as well about all the process that, uh, you know, the CPUs, now GPUs kind of industry has gone through for the last many years [chuckles] to miniature, to miniaturize, to basically, you know, um, process a lot more in a small, much smaller footprint so-

Stéphane Bancel (41:26)
Hundred percent

Jean-Philippe Courtois (41:26)
... it seems-

Stéphane Bancel (41:26)
And just, uh, one example of I was discussing with engineers maybe six month ago.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (41:30)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (41:31)
And I was obsessed a- about square inch on the floor and so on, and one engineer came with a great idea that nobody had thought about before. And he's like, "By the way, we can move all the compute of a machine out of a room." 'Cause, you know, we operate, of course, in clean rooms-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (41:44)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (41:44)
... for the safety of the patient, because you don't want-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (41:47)
Of course

Stéphane Bancel (41:47)
... bacteria in the product, of course.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (41:48)
Yes.

Stéphane Bancel (41:49)
But he say, "All the compute is still in some of the robots." I'm like, "What? I didn't realize."

Jean-Philippe Courtois (41:53)
[chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (41:53)
So we moved all the compute out, and so all the compute is out-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (41:56)
Wow

Stéphane Bancel (41:56)
... so there's a lot... It's-- Again, human ingenuity, when you are very clear about what problem we're solving for-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (42:01)
[chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (42:02)
... is just amazing.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (42:03)
Uh, there's no limits. So shifting gears now, I'd love to talk about the combo of, again, biotech, pharma, and AI. You-- I think you, you've been announcing already a couple of years ago, a partnership with OpenAI, uh, to accelerate drug discovery, and there's obviously a lot of hype around AI in biotech right now. So what is AI actually doing at Moderna today? Not in the future, but right now. And how do you separate AI hype from AI impact in your operations today, Stéphane?

Stéphane Bancel (42:33)
Yeah, it's a great question. So I think i- in our world, there's two big application of AI. There's AI for science, making new medicine-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (42:42)
Yep

Stéphane Bancel (42:42)
... and AI for... accelerating business processes, like work reinvention around AI, so we can serve a customer faster. Those are two very different use.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (42:51)
Hmm.

Stéphane Bancel (42:52)
On the innovation side of the house, we at Moderna have had a few innovation that have come from AI that have been put in place in term of the molecules we are developing. This is just the beginning of a huge tsunami coming for the industry and for Moderna.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (43:07)
[chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (43:07)
But most consumers will only see the benefit in years from now.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (43:11)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (43:11)
Because you need to invent a new molecule, and then you need to test them in the clinic.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (43:14)
Of course.

Stéphane Bancel (43:15)
Uh, where there's already impact on the consumer positively with AI in our case is shrinking business process time, because then if-- you can develop a drug faster, and it can-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (43:27)
[clears throat]

Stéphane Bancel (43:27)
... be available to patient faster and cheaper, and that's what we are trying to do with work reinvention, and that has already example in Moderna in manufacturing, where the team have used AI or using AI every day in quality to improve-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (43:41)
Quality

Stéphane Bancel (43:42)
... quality. Like we build an agent that when there's, there's-- when there's a mistake happening on the manufacturing floor, by law, and it's like-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (43:50)
Mm-hmm

Stéphane Bancel (43:50)
... good business practice, but by law in my industry, we need to document what happened as a deviation, and you need to document a corrective action.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (43:59)
Hmm.

Stéphane Bancel (44:00)
I was getting frustrated that our corrective action were not really improving in term of repeating corrective action.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (44:06)
Yes.

Stéphane Bancel (44:07)
So I told the team, "Let's build an agent that will refuse-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (44:11)
Hmm

Stéphane Bancel (44:11)
... a corrective action submission if it's not good enough," because the agent finds hole in the-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (44:17)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (44:17)
... corrective action that it could still happen again. So we build an agent to do that, and our quality has improved.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (44:23)
Hmm.

Stéphane Bancel (44:23)
So that's another example. We use it in marketing-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (44:26)
Great example

Stéphane Bancel (44:26)
... we use it in finance, we use it in HR.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (44:28)
[clears throat]

Stéphane Bancel (44:28)
So I think you're gonna see sh- mid to short term, but already today, impact on the speed at which medicine can be developed through business process reinvention.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (44:39)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (44:39)
The science will take longer, but the science will be very profound.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (44:43)
Hmm.

Stéphane Bancel (44:43)
We're gonna be able to invent medicine that my best scientists cannot think about because the human body has twenty thousand genes, as we spoke about, has forty thousand metabolite. Think, you know, glucose and other things in your body, and you have trillions of cells in your body. And those things-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (45:00)
Hmm

Stéphane Bancel (45:00)
... are talking to each other, sometime in nonlinear way. So there's no human who can have the functioning of a human body in their brain, like a good-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (45:08)
[chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (45:08)
... engineer can have a functioning of an engine of a car in their brain.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (45:12)
Oh. Uh, those are amazing examples. Just for a pure kind of people talent standpoint, I mean, how do you make that happen? In other words, do you have like a chief AI officer working hand in hand with the different y- business units, I mean, from discovery to sales and manufacturing on AI capacity? How does it work to make it so effective?

Stéphane Bancel (45:34)
Yeah. So I'm de facto the chief AI officer because I really think-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (45:38)
You are

Stéphane Bancel (45:38)
... given the impact the technology has already had, if it will never improve again, and given we know the compute is doubling every six month, I think any company that's serious in AI, the CEO has to be the chief AI officer in term of understanding the technology and driving the change in the business.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (45:59)
Hmm.

Stéphane Bancel (45:59)
Then, of course, I have teams helping me do that. I'm not alone.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (46:03)
Of course.

Stéphane Bancel (46:03)
So of course, we have a tech team. We're spending a lot of time understanding the, what the technology can do. As you said, we have partnership with OpenAI, but we're also working, for example, with Anthropic on coding a lot.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (46:14)
Yep.

Stéphane Bancel (46:14)
Uh, with vibe coding. We-- actually, this morning, I was on, on a call with the leadership of DeepMind at Google on the science side of things. We're also developing our own machine learning system for doing-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (46:27)
Yep

Stéphane Bancel (46:27)
... some biology, where LLM is not the right tool for doing machine learning. And then for, for the work reinvention, we actually started with my head of HR, uh, a work reinvention team, where we're basically prioritizing w-what are the few, we are free right now, big enterprise-wide project that we want to redo from scratch business process, reinvent AI first.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (46:51)
Yep.

Stéphane Bancel (46:51)
Uh, we have same thing happening in each of the big function of the company. Like for example, my CFO has four or five projects within finance to totally reinvent how you do things in finance and same thing across each function. And then we are trying to really help managers at the department level to think-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (47:08)
Hmm

Stéphane Bancel (47:08)
... about what they can do in the department.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (47:10)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (47:10)
And then at the individual level, we are doing a lot of work in term of training.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (47:15)
Yep.

Stéphane Bancel (47:15)
Every employee of Moderna has access to a GPT Enterprise from OpenAI.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (47:20)
Mm-hmm.

Stéphane Bancel (47:21)
Uh, we are doing training on how to use task, how to use project, how to write GPTs.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (47:24)
Yeah. Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (47:25)
So all those things we have done. Uh, we, we, we deployed GPT at Moderna in the spring of two thousand twenty-three just after OpenAI GPT came in November-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (47:36)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (47:36)
... twenty-two.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (47:37)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (47:37)
Uh, we have a Moderna version in the Amazon cloud.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (47:42)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (47:42)
With only Moderna data coming in, and the data not going back educating-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (47:46)
Hmm

Stéphane Bancel (47:46)
... you know, the rest of the world with our confidential information.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (47:49)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (47:49)
So we have been at it early, uh, and we're trying to stay on the frontier of what can be done with AI by having deep partnership with those, you know, frontier companies like OpenAI-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (47:59)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (47:59)
... and so on. I was with-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (48:01)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (48:01)
... the leadership of OpenAI on the phone last Friday, and again, with somebody here at Moderna on Tuesday this week. So this is a permanent, uh, reinvention and a permanent learning from all of us, starting with me. I even have tasks set up-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (48:13)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (48:14)
... to keep me updated, uh, several time a week on what are the-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (48:17)
Every morning

Stéphane Bancel (48:17)
... new use case-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (48:18)
Yes. Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (48:18)
... at Moderna, but also outside the company.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (48:21)
No, it's an amazing, uh, actually, uh, suc-success, growing success story when people sometimes have some doubts about AI usage in large companies. Well, I think, uh, [chuckles] what you just described is, is quite exciting. Now, I li- I like, I like Stéphane now to, to explore a little bit the, the future of pharmaceutical innovation, because I think the landscape, uh, you know it better than any of us, the landscape is rapidly evolvingWe have established big pharma with massive resources and global distribution. We have biotech companies like your company that are nimble, sense-driven, willing to take bets. And now we also have a new wave of AI-powered companies entering the space, like Manaus AI, founded by Reid Hoffman, as an example, which is using AI to accelerate cancer drug discovery. Where do you see the biggest disruption coming from in the next five years to ten years? Pick your timeframe. And how does Moderna position itself at the intersection of biotech agility, AI acceleration, and the commercial reach needed to bring personalized medicine to every patient in the world?

Stéphane Bancel (49:24)
Yeah. So within the pharma biotech companies, I think it goes back to the two chapters I spoke about, which is gonna be huge innovation in new medicine that were just unthinkable before.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (49:34)
Yep.

Stéphane Bancel (49:35)
And the acceleration of the time it takes to develop a drug because of all the business process work reinvention, I would not be shocked if in three or five years' time, it takes half the time, so five years versus ten years to develop a medicine. So when you multiply this across the industry-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (49:51)
Mm

Stéphane Bancel (49:51)
... that's an amazing impact for patients, of course, that are waiting for the medicine. But the biggest impact will be on medicine as we learn more and more about how the human body works. So I think outside the, the companies themselves-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (50:03)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (50:03)
... there's a few things that I think are gonna be really important. First is, I believe we are a few years away, maybe five years away, to be able to map human body in silico.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (50:15)
Hmm.

Stéphane Bancel (50:15)
But I mean cell by cell-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (50:17)
Wow

Stéphane Bancel (50:17)
... mechanism by mechanism. Like you will map an engine of an airplane-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (50:21)
Yep

Stéphane Bancel (50:21)
... or an airplane with the engine as one of its parts, uh, with all the wires and all the mechanical parts.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (50:27)
Yep.

Stéphane Bancel (50:27)
We're gonna be able to do the same thing. And again, it's a very complex problem, twenty thousand genes, forty thousand metabolites, trillions of cells, but it's not an infinite problem, right?

Jean-Philippe Courtois (50:36)
Yes.

Stéphane Bancel (50:36)
And it's not black magic. It has rules.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (50:39)
[chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (50:39)
A lot of time things happen in biology, in medicine, in disease we don't understand, but it's because we don't understand. It's not because it's black magic.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (50:46)
Mm-hmm.

Stéphane Bancel (50:46)
So I think we're gonna get to a world where there'll be no more black magic, where we would really understand mechanistically what has happened to somebody. Um, and this will enable us and others in the field to invent new medicine. Because if you know how the engine works-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (51:02)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (51:02)
... you can then go fix it because you understand how it works, right?

Jean-Philippe Courtois (51:05)
Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Stéphane Bancel (51:05)
The other piece I think is gonna be fascinating is the improvement in understanding of how disease progress.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (51:12)
Mm-hmm.

Stéphane Bancel (51:12)
Because we spoke about cancer earlier. Cancer, you don't have a tumor, you know, five centimeter large happening overnight. It starts with one cell-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (51:20)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (51:20)
... and then two cells and then four cells. And then the diagnostic tools, whether it's through blood work or through imaging, enabled by AI, enabling to see much earlier disease, 'cause we all know the earlier you can treat the disease, the higher the chance of treating it.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (51:35)
Cool.

Stéphane Bancel (51:35)
And especially if you have exactly the right tool versus guessing or taking like chemotherapy.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (51:40)
Mm.

Stéphane Bancel (51:41)
Big tool, like big hammer, going after-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (51:43)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (51:43)
... and destroying a lot of things around the problem, like happening with chemotherapy.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (51:48)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (51:48)
I believe personally, chemotherapy will be a thing of the past, and in twenty years, people will say, "Why did we ever use chemotherapy? This was barbaric."

Jean-Philippe Courtois (51:55)
This is crazy. Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (51:56)
Yeah.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (51:56)
Mm.

Stéphane Bancel (51:56)
The other piece I think is gonna be a huge impact is on health equalities. One other piece that drive me crazy-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (52:02)
Mm

Stéphane Bancel (52:02)
... is just here in Boston, where I live-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (52:04)
Yep

Stéphane Bancel (52:04)
... between the richest ZIP code and the poorest ZIP code, there's ten years of life expectancy difference.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (52:12)
Wow, ten years.

Stéphane Bancel (52:13)
Ten years in the same city, just two different around the small ZIP code.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (52:17)
Couple of blocks away. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (52:18)
It's crazy.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (52:20)
Wow.

Stéphane Bancel (52:20)
And one of these thing is the inequality in understanding disease early. Inequalities, of course, access to healthy food versus crap food in a box, in a box.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (52:29)
Yep. Yep.

Stéphane Bancel (52:30)
There's a lot of pieces, but diagnostic is really important. Uh, understanding disease early is really important. So I think another place where the world is gonna change tremendously is we're gonna move from sick care to really healthcare.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (52:43)
Mm.

Stéphane Bancel (52:43)
Today, if you think about what we call s- healthcare is not healthcare.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (52:46)
Yes. [chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (52:46)
It's really sick care, which is I have a cancer, I have a heart attack-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (52:50)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (52:50)
... I have a... And do something for me.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (52:53)
Yes.

Stéphane Bancel (52:53)
I think the world is gonna change, and, uh, the companies of the future are gonna be companies that are gonna help people st-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (53:01)
[clears throat]

Stéphane Bancel (53:01)
... stay healthy.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (53:03)
Yes.

Stéphane Bancel (53:03)
I would not be surprised if some pharma companies will end up disappearing.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (53:08)
Of course.

Stéphane Bancel (53:08)
Because if you think about it, if you're in a world where you need much less medicine because you have very early prevention, very early diagnostic of disease and intervention to revert the disease, it has already been shown in some disease, that some disease you can revert them back to a healthy state.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (53:25)
Hmm.

Stéphane Bancel (53:27)
You know, some companies are developing new organs-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (53:30)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (53:31)
... out of cells from your own body. People have already done, you know, 3D-printed bladder.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (53:35)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (53:36)
People are working on 3D-printed hearts, starting from just a few cells from your skin or from a blood draw, from just your blood.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (53:43)
Hmm.

Stéphane Bancel (53:43)
And they're making heart cells, they're making bladder cells.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (53:46)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (53:46)
So you can think about a world where we're gonna be able to change parts in our bodies are they are too damaged, as they are too hurt, either if you have an accident or via disease or via aging. And so all those things happening outside the industry is what gets me a lot of excitement, that we're really gonna move into a world of preventative medicine-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (54:04)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (54:04)
... where we find disease very early, a bit like in Star Trek.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (54:07)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (54:07)
You find disease very early, and then you can treat them, so you don't become sick.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (54:12)
That, that's, that's an amazing, uh, perspective, uh, Stéphane. And when you think about the kind of core capabilities that will be needed to succeed, you know, because I was cutting out kind of the, the, the, the, the key types of organization like biotech, big pharmas, AI-born companies like Manaus and others, how, how would you express the shape of that kind of company that can succeed in this new kind of healthcare as opposed to sick care [chuckles] model in the future?

Stéphane Bancel (54:41)
Yeah. So I think a few things come to mind. One is, of course, a deep understanding of biology.Because you're gonna want to-- because human is about biology, to be able to-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (54:50)
Yep

Stéphane Bancel (54:50)
... understand it so that you can apply it to do good-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (54:53)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (54:53)
... to serve your, your, your, your, your, your, your customer or the patient, if you're directly interacting with patients. I think then the ability to connect the dots and to leverage technology, we just spoke about AI.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (55:05)
Yes.

Stéphane Bancel (55:05)
Uh, to leverage technology where it's for discovery of the delivery of a care. You know, as we talk about AI in imaging, about AI-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (55:12)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (55:13)
... uh, down the road, I believe, if I'm still alive, uh, that-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (55:18)
[chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (55:18)
... my doctor will have my body in silico as a model.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (55:22)
As a model. [chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (55:23)
And as we-- I do blood work, as I go for manual checkup and other-- use other devices, that model will be adapted, and will allow my doctor to, uh, help me do things. Because also everybody's gonna be sequenced. Uh, you're gonna be able to find a lot of disease early, uh, which is, of course, again-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (55:40)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (55:40)
... the best prevention. I think the use of vaccines is gonna be much more amplified, because as we know, vaccine can prevent cancer. Think about HPV, that amazing-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (55:48)
Mm-hmm

Stéphane Bancel (55:48)
... ca- vaccine developed by my, my colleagues at Merck or MSD outside the US, that every-- I believe every young boy or every young girl should have when they are teenager, before they start kissing too much, because that's how-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (56:00)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (56:00)
... the virus spreads-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (56:01)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (56:01)
... through body fluids.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (56:02)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (56:02)
Dying of HPV cancer, head and neck, ovarian cancer down the road is just criminal, because that-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (56:10)
It is

Stéphane Bancel (56:10)
... can be prevented.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (56:11)
Hmm. So, I mean, w-wonderful, uh, again, uh, kind of picturing of, of the future, Stéphane. Now, I'd like us to move from the industry, from the science to the public health-

Stéphane Bancel (56:24)
Mm-hmm

Jean-Philippe Courtois (56:24)
... and, uh, kind of the public debate, right? In August 2024, Robert Kennedy Jr., now US Health Secretary, revoked $500 million, I think, in federal funding for mRNA vaccine programs. He's expressed public sc-skepticism about long-term safety despite, uh, again, three-plus billion dose administered, and even the FDA's lead biologics regulator call deprioritizing mRNA research wise. But this goes far beyond mRNA. We are seeing a broader trend, I think, in America, rising skepticism towards scientific institutions, declining trust in public health authorities, and increasing politicization of medical research, which represent a profound challenge, not just for Moderna, but I assume for the anti-scientific community. So as a scientific leader, how do you maintain public confidence while continuing life-saving research?

Stéphane Bancel (57:18)
I think it has to go to communication as a big parameter, which is to explain to people, to share the data. Um, if I could go back in time, one thing I will do differently and try to do a better job is to explain in 2020-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (57:33)
Mm

Stéphane Bancel (57:33)
... that we and our colleagues in other companies never cut any corner for safety of the development of the vaccines.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (57:39)
Yes.

Stéphane Bancel (57:40)
And you can imagine how people can believe that we cut corners, because how could you do one year if it takes ten years usually? Um, we did that because we were able to do a lot of things in parallel because there was unlimited amount of money for clinical studies, which is why the US government, as we talked about, gave us and others, you know-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (57:59)
Yep

Stéphane Bancel (57:59)
... billions of dollars because we told them, "If you're to help stop this pandemic, we need vaccines. If you want vaccines quicker, we need a lot of money so that we can take a lot of business risk-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (58:10)
Yep

Stéphane Bancel (58:10)
... doing things in parallel, so you don't do them one after the other," which is what people do usually to manage business risks, financing risk, where they do things one after the other once they know things are working. Uh, because if not, they will be, uh, irresponsible financially in normal times. But in war times, when you fight a virus and people are dying-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (58:30)
[clears throat]

Stéphane Bancel (58:30)
... and economies are stopped-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (58:31)
Yep

Stéphane Bancel (58:31)
... the government basically just threw money at the company to see everything you can do in parallel, do in parallel, which is what we did. The other things that they did at the government level is that they stopped reviewing all the other non-COVID vaccine. Why?

Jean-Philippe Courtois (58:43)
Hmm.

Stéphane Bancel (58:44)
So that all the people at FDA could focus on-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (58:46)
Yep

Stéphane Bancel (58:46)
... Moderna and Pfizer and the other vaccine, so we could go very fast. In normal peacetime, you know, it would take a month to get just a meeting with FDA. We had the name-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (58:57)
Right

Stéphane Bancel (58:57)
... and mobile number of all the people on the Moderna team. We could call them all.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (58:59)
Could call them all. Yeah. Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (59:00)
And so we didn't do a good enough job, we collectively, but us, Moderna too, to explain what was being done that could enable this without cutting corners.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (59:10)
Yes.

Stéphane Bancel (59:10)
That, of course, the, the vaccination mandate, which is not the vaccine, but the obligation to be vaccinated-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (59:17)
Yep

Stéphane Bancel (59:17)
... created in the US a lot of political backlash. Um, and so there's a lot of things like this. Look, like always in life, and again, going back to history-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (59:25)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (59:25)
... there are these pendulums going back and forth. Uh, by the way, when Monsieur Pasteur started doing vaccine, there was massive public backlash.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (59:33)
Yes. [chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (59:34)
Um, and so I think things are gonna go back and forth. At the end of the day, you can say gravity does not exist, but jump by the window, and you will see gravity catch up with you very quickly.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (59:45)
[chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (59:45)
And so it's the same thing with biology, just a bit slower, which is you can say measles is not an issue-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (59:50)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (59:50)
... stop vaccinating kids by spreading misinformation, and your measles cases are going up as we are seeing.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (59:56)
Yes.

Stéphane Bancel (59:56)
And so I think those real outbreaks that unfortunately are actually gonna hurt a lot of humans that should not be hurt because the product exists-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:00:04)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (1:00:04)
... are gonna remind people and get the pendulum to go back. So again, being a long-term thinker, being an optimist, having studied history-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:00:12)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (1:00:12)
... I know the world's gonna go back to a good place. Uh, it is not right now in a good place, and it's of course sad because innocent people are getting hurt by that misinformation.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:00:22)
Yeah, no, that's, I think it's a great, great way to, to actually, uh, summarize where we are and be optimistic about the future. But yet today, again, what is, what is your recommendation, not just for yourself, obviously you're doing it, but for your peers as scientists or CEOs of large biotech companies and others to, again, really regain trust of the massive public opinion in the world on health? What should we do more of? What should we do differently?To tell the story of the reality, of the evidence-

Stéphane Bancel (1:00:53)
Yeah, I think communicating-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:00:54)
... of the science

Stéphane Bancel (1:00:54)
... I think communicating, I think explaining, uh, mistakes as well-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:01:00)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (1:01:00)
... because mistakes happen. Uh-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:01:02)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (1:01:02)
... whether it's done by industry labs, government labs, public health leaders, business leaders-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:01:08)
Mm-hmm

Stéphane Bancel (1:01:08)
... mistakes happen. So acknowledging publicly the mistake, I think is a great way to build trust.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:01:13)
Yep.

Stéphane Bancel (1:01:14)
Um, and I think, uh, sharing some of the benefit that people are gonna, that are gonna get. I mean, we just spoke about the improvement in diagnostic, the improvement in disease. Uh-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:01:26)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (1:01:26)
... I think over time, care will become cheaper.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:01:30)
Mm-hmm.

Stéphane Bancel (1:01:30)
In a lot of places, some people, because of their income cannot... or their lack of insurance, cannot get access to the best care they can. I think as we move to a prevention world-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:01:39)
[clears throat]

Stéphane Bancel (1:01:40)
... uh, as true health cannot seek care, this is gonna be less and less of a problem. So I think those-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:01:44)
Mm-hmm

Stéphane Bancel (1:01:44)
... are the type of things we need to do more of communication and explaining, including mistakes.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:01:49)
Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. So it's a good segue, uh, Stéphane, in terms of global access. You're even talking about access in Boston, right? [chuckles] To MedCid a few blocks away. Uh, and we've seen some of that obviously with COVID, unfortunately, where it was super hard to make the vaccine available to billions of people in emerging countries. So what is your vision for global access to breakthrough therapies, again, like the personalized cancer vaccine you talked about? How c- how is it possible as a CEO as well of a very valuable company to deliver both shareholder value while ensuring equitable access, or do we need a fundamentally a new model to reinvent that model?

Stéphane Bancel (1:02:32)
Yeah. So I think to really solve it for good, you need technology like AI to move to true health care, not sick care.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:02:42)
Mm.

Stéphane Bancel (1:02:43)
Um, because it's a bit like, like your car is an interesting analogy, which is, as you know, if you never change the oil of your car, never do car maintenance, your car is not gonna last as long.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:02:55)
Yep.

Stéphane Bancel (1:02:56)
The same thing with our bodies. As we live every day, as I'm gonna eat today my lunch, my body gets older because the very process of eating is actually having a lot of consequence chemically inside my body-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:03:08)
Mm

Stéphane Bancel (1:03:08)
... which makes my body older today than I, I was yesterday and the day before. And so as we, uh, understand all those mechanism and put those in place and really enable through technology and mass dissemination of information, uh, of a technology to deal with things early, then the cost will be much lower. It's like, you know, if you do the pre-prevenance m-maintenance of your car, it doesn't cost you a lot every year. But if you wait for your car to be destroyed, and you have to change, you know, uh, the, a big part of your engine, then the cost-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:03:39)
Yep

Stéphane Bancel (1:03:39)
... is very expensive.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:03:40)
Yeah. That's a good analogy. Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (1:03:42)
I think we're gonna truly solve the cost problem of healthcare by moving-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:03:46)
Mm-hmm

Stéphane Bancel (1:03:46)
... true prevention healthcare, not sick care. Sick care is very expensive.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:03:50)
Yeah. So now I'd like to move to a leadership culture, kind of a conversation for next couple of questions to come, uh, Stéphane. I, I'd love you to walk us through the evolving culture of Moderna, because I think to do, to do what you did, and to keep doing what you promised to do, which, um, I know you're working on, which is incredible vision, you've got to be bold, relentless, curious, collaborative, honest. So how do you shape such a culture? And as a CEO of the company, how do you make it real, authentic, and lasting or changing as well, given the, the new challenges you have? Tell, tell us more about the way you do that.

Stéphane Bancel (1:04:27)
Yeah. So look, I know no other way to lead but by example. Uh, and so I hold a super high bar on myself on living to those values.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:04:38)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (1:04:38)
Um, I, you know, in our case, you know, I had the mission of a company written on every wall of every conference room in the company.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:04:45)
[chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (1:04:46)
Uh, and I point to it all the time. Uh, and I tell people in my teams, which is they need to be driven by the mission, because either today or tomorrow or in five years, somebody they love is gonna be needing a Moderna medicine, whether it's cancer or-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:05:03)
Mm

Stéphane Bancel (1:05:03)
... I would prefer to prevent disease like vaccines.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:05:06)
Yep.

Stéphane Bancel (1:05:07)
And that every day matters. And, and because by extension, you know, people in your family, Jean-Philippe, I don't know them-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:05:14)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (1:05:14)
... uh, but I know you love y- people in your, in your world like I love people in my world.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:05:18)
Of course.

Stéphane Bancel (1:05:18)
Uh, that's what makes us human, and it's one of the many things we have-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:05:21)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (1:05:21)
... in common. I use that mental model for people on the planet.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:05:26)
Mm.

Stéphane Bancel (1:05:27)
Which is, I don't know most people on the planet, obviously, but I care about them as I care about my family because they are part of a family, of an ecosystem of friends, uh-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:05:35)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (1:05:35)
... community, and so on. And I think that if all of us at Moderna are always obsessed about that, and so I try as a leader to talk about that all the time. I think as humans, we get very distracted. I think it's even worse now with social media. By the way-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:05:50)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (1:05:50)
... I am on no social media. Uh-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:05:53)
[laughs]

Stéphane Bancel (1:05:53)
Uh-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:05:54)
That's a good practice. [chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (1:05:55)
Uh, which I think is great for my mental health and great for my ability to focus and, and stay present and stay-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:06:03)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (1:06:03)
... uh, on mission. And I think-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:06:05)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (1:06:05)
... we all get distracted. And I think what is important in leaders is to every day remind people why they do what they are doing.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:06:13)
Yes. The purpose.

Stéphane Bancel (1:06:14)
Because at the end of the day, people will use their job as a set of tasks and a-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:06:17)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (1:06:17)
... to-do list and going to meetings and so on. And if you're not passionate every day about what you do, then you lose your energy, you lose your commitment, you lose your relentlessness.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:06:28)
Yes.

Stéphane Bancel (1:06:28)
And so what I try to do as a leader is, is that, to always put back the patient in everything we do every meeting, every meeting, literally.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:06:35)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (1:06:36)
And I'm obsessed about quality and speed-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:06:40)
Mm

Stéphane Bancel (1:06:40)
... of how we operate the company, because-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:06:43)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (1:06:43)
... I don't believe yet we operate at the best version of Moderna, and patients are suffering, or patients in the future will suffer because today I'm not operating as the best version of Moderna that I should and I can.And that's a driving force that I want to talk about to people over time, which is if today we cannot develop in the lab a drug as efficiently as we could, well, in-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:07:04)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (1:07:04)
... ten or fifteen years, people are gonna get that drug later because it would have-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:07:07)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (1:07:07)
... taken us two more weeks to do something that we should not have if we had done our best work today.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:07:12)
Well, that's obviously an, an amazing mission, but also a very frustrating, frustrating mission in many ways, right? Because it's a never-ending game [chuckles] in a way.

Stéphane Bancel (1:07:20)
It is. So, uh, it is, it is. Uh, but at the same time, it's very energizing, so it's both, which is interesting.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:07:28)
Yes.

Stéphane Bancel (1:07:28)
Uh, which is it's very, uh, heavy sometime.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:07:32)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (1:07:32)
Uh, but if you do your best work every day with the best team, then it's very energizing 'cause I don't know how to do better than my best work with the best team.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:07:42)
Yes.

Stéphane Bancel (1:07:42)
So it's always raising the bar on making sure I have the best team, making the bar I do the best work I can. I communicate, I help people, I give energy.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:07:50)
Yes.

Stéphane Bancel (1:07:50)
And I'm always trying to figure out where are we losing energy in the company-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:07:54)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (1:07:54)
... because of business processes or lack of technology, which is why I'm so excited about AI.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:08:00)
Yes.

Stéphane Bancel (1:08:00)
For me, AI in the business process reinvention side of a company is it should, uh, enable all my employees to be much more engaged, much more energized because their-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:08:09)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (1:08:09)
... work is more impactful every day because the part of their work that drives no value-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:08:14)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (1:08:15)
... uh, and drains them is gone-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:08:17)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (1:08:17)
... and run by a piece of software.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:08:19)
No, I, I, I love it, uh, Stéphane. To me, in a way, you, you, you summarize very well what, what my conviction is. I mean, the chief executive officer is the chief energy officer. Positive energy officer, by the way [chuckles] which is always that-

Stéphane Bancel (1:08:31)
Yes

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:08:31)
... positive because they're all kind of energies. But, uh, I can feel it, and I can feel the vibes, I'm sure, through the doors of your building out there in Boston [chuckles] all the way to Paris. Now, continuing on that discussion a little bit, you know, I had a fascinating conversation with Pascal Soriot that you know well. He was AstraZeneca, the wonderful pleasure to, to, to be a director on his board when Pascal became the CEO of, of AstraZeneca a long time ago already. And what struck me most was Pascal conviction about what truly unlocks human performance. He breaks it down into three things a leader must align. Number one, the shared purpose, saving lives. Number two, the individual contribution. Does every person understand how their specific daily work connects to that mission? And, and the culture, number three, a workplace where people genuinely enjoy doing that work together. And he added two principles as well, by the way. Culture is invisible infrastructure. You build it before you need it and assume good intent. So do you actually believe it holds in... that actually, you know, it-- those such principles hold in high-stake environments, or is it a luxury leaders telling them-- telling that to themselves, assume good intent in particular?

Stéphane Bancel (1:09:48)
No, I completely agree with Pascal, and I will not change a word. Uh, look, media makes us believe that there's a lot of bad people out there in the world, and I don't think-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:10:01)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (1:10:01)
... it's true. If you look at the facts and the data-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:10:03)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (1:10:03)
... it is actually not true. Uh, most people want to do a good job. Most people want to contribute. Uh, when I say most, I mean ninety-nine point nine, so almost everybody-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:10:15)
Yeah [chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (1:10:15)
... I mean. Um, and so because of that math, you have to assume that people have good intent.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:10:24)
Mm.

Stéphane Bancel (1:10:24)
And when you see outcomes that you don't like, you need to figure out why.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:10:29)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (1:10:29)
And you figure out, if you're obsessed about the why until you get to the true root cause of a problem, and sometimes you have your personal problem. Sometimes an, an employee at the company might be going through a-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:10:40)
Mm

Stéphane Bancel (1:10:40)
... very, very tough time in their personal life-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:10:42)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (1:10:42)
... which means that-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:10:43)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (1:10:43)
... we might have made a mistake, they might not be engaged, and so on, because you don't realize they are taking care of a mother with, uh, terminal cancer or a kid-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:10:49)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (1:10:49)
... with suicidal, you know, thoughts and so on. And that, of course, has a huge impact. I always tell people, "Look, I'm one human being. I'm not two." And so the Stéphane that walks in your office every morning is the same Stéphane. It's one Stéphane. And so-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:11:00)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (1:11:01)
... um, which is why I always a-advise our teams to focus on human harmony, not work-life balance.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:11:09)
Mm.

Stéphane Bancel (1:11:09)
I like to tell people my, my life and my work is not balanced at all. It's totally-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:11:13)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (1:11:13)
... out of balance.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:11:14)
Yes.

Stéphane Bancel (1:11:14)
But my job is to keep those two in harmony so that I could-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:11:18)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (1:11:19)
... be the best CEO I can. I can be the best husband I can. Am I the best husband in the world? I don't think so. Am I the best CEO in the world? I don't think so. But I'm trying to, for those pieces that are really important to me-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:11:31)
Mm

Stéphane Bancel (1:11:31)
... uh, to be the best version that I can be in that ecosystem. Um-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:11:35)
Yes. [clears throat]

Stéphane Bancel (1:11:36)
And I agree with Pascal a hundred percent. You need to assume good intent.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:11:41)
Oh, it's a wonderful, uh, convergence we have between the two great leaders. I'm fascinated by something I think you do every quarter, Stéphane, I'm told. You spend time at home in imagining where Moderna will be in three or five years, then ask yourself what CEO the company will need, and you reinvent yourself to become the leader. Is it something you still do, and can you walk us through the way it works?

Stéphane Bancel (1:12:04)
Sure. Yeah, I still do it. You have good sources, uh, Jean-Philippe. I still do it, and it took me a couple years after starting Moderna to start realizing I needed to do it because what was really hard for me is, you know, since now July 2011, I've-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:12:21)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (1:12:21)
... walked in my office with Moderna on the door of a building-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:12:25)
Mm

Stéphane Bancel (1:12:25)
... and as a CEO of a company. But as you-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:12:27)
Mm

Stéphane Bancel (1:12:27)
... can easily understand, when Moderna was me and one scientist in actually flagship's office or VC-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:12:33)
[chuckles] Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (1:12:33)
... back in 2011, before we even had the lab, to being preclinical-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:12:37)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (1:12:37)
... with twenty people doing research, to being in a clinic, to, uh, being public, to IPO, to, uh, the pandemic, it's not the same company. It does mRNA-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:12:47)
Of course

Stéphane Bancel (1:12:47)
... it says Moderna, I'm the CEO, but it's not the same company at all.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:12:52)
Mm.

Stéphane Bancel (1:12:52)
Uh, but I had to go slowly through that process because I live with myself every day, right? And so what I realized a year or two into being the CEO of Moderna is thatI was doing things I should stop doing. There was new things I need to, to start doing, and I was not doing it in a structured way.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:13:12)
Mm. [clears throat]

Stéphane Bancel (1:13:12)
And I, I, I told myself it's most probably a mistake, uh, because you cannot rely on your intuition, on people's feedback to do the right thing. And so I realized that because when I was changing so fast, the biggest problem is I had to redo the job description of a CEO much more often. And that's kind of what I do.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:13:30)
Yes.

Stéphane Bancel (1:13:30)
I do it at home because that's the only place I can be free for five hours, quiet, whatever time I need.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:13:35)
Mm.

Stéphane Bancel (1:13:35)
And I start by thinking about the company a few years down the road to a very clear mental picture of a couple key scenario and-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:13:43)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (1:13:43)
... what's gonna be the size, number of countries, the number of products. So try to really get in my head and my gut kind of the company.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:13:50)
Right.

Stéphane Bancel (1:13:50)
And then I write the job description of if I was hit by a bus today or if I was telling the board-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:13:55)
[chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (1:13:55)
... I'm doing something else to- today.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:13:57)
Okay. [chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (1:13:58)
What would be the job description that should be handed to the headhunter or to the board or to a new CEO? This is your job.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:14:04)
Wow.

Stéphane Bancel (1:14:04)
And I do it, and then I turn on, back on my computer and my calendar. And again, I'm, I'm pretty tough on myself. I look at my calendar over the last month.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:14:14)
Yes.

Stéphane Bancel (1:14:14)
And I look how I use my time, and I critique myself of did I use my time in the places I should have?

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:14:20)
Yes.

Stéphane Bancel (1:14:20)
Are there things I need to start doing that I didn't do before?

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:14:23)
Yes.

Stéphane Bancel (1:14:23)
Are there things I need to stop doing, doing to stop, stop doing them, or it needs to be somebody else on my team or in the company doing those tasks because they're important. So, so that process I still do around every quarter, and doing it-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:14:35)
Right

Stéphane Bancel (1:14:35)
... has been really important for me because the company has changed so much.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:14:39)
Yes.

Stéphane Bancel (1:14:40)
And I need to be the best CEO I can of Moderna today, not Moderna six months ago.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:14:45)
That's an amazing process. I love your, your kind of, uh, religion on time management, also on, uh, on, on your dedication to actually what your job is and should be. It must be a, a delight for the board, by the way, to have a, a refreshed job description for the CEO every three months. [chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (1:15:02)
Yeah. You need to ask them that. [laughing]

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:15:05)
[laughing] So coming to almost the last few, last few questions, uh, Stéphane. And going back in a way to your personal roots, family, and so on, you've also talked about your experience as an immigrant and how it shaped your tolerance for people who communicate in a second language and what it means as well in their life. So can you share with us how has your immigrant journey influenced your leadership, and what does Moderna do maybe differently because of that perspective?

Stéphane Bancel (1:15:32)
Sure. So let me start by the end of your question. What we've done differently since the beginning is we've always hired the best, regardless of where they come from. Uh, and in the early days of Moderna, somebody coined the term the United Nations of Moderna, because we literally had maybe 30, 40 people in the company.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:15:51)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (1:15:51)
Most of them were from around the world. The people literally from Africa, from the Middle East, from China, from Japan, uh, from Europe, obviously many countries, including Iceland. Uh, and I know-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:16:02)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (1:16:02)
... because one day at one of our happy hours on a Friday, I got on Amazon a big map of the world, put it on the wall, and the people having beers and stuff, and everybody had a pin. And the pin was not what your nationality is because this can change in your lifetime.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:16:16)
Yes.

Stéphane Bancel (1:16:16)
And sometimes many times. The pin was, where were you physically born?

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:16:20)
Mm.

Stéphane Bancel (1:16:20)
And we started with a son in Asia, and people slowly went and told their stories, and you have pins everywhere.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:16:26)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (1:16:26)
And so that has shaped me a lot. Uh, I remember when I was at Eli Lilly after my MBA.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:16:32)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (1:16:32)
Uh, I ended up being able to hire a lot of super smart foreigners. Why? Because we had an accent, and-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:16:39)
Mm

Stéphane Bancel (1:16:39)
... especially people from China.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:16:41)
Yeah. [chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (1:16:41)
And people in the Midwest sometimes had no patience-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:16:44)
[chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (1:16:44)
... to see the talent-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:16:46)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (1:16:46)
... through the difficulty of communicating, and they will not-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:16:50)
Absolutely

Stéphane Bancel (1:16:50)
... promote the best talent, and I will go and steal people within the company.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:16:54)
Yes, the best ones. [chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (1:16:55)
I have best ones. I had a couple Chinese, uh, people working with me that was just unbelievable scientists, unbelievable scientists-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:17:02)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (1:17:02)
... who would be doing so much work and be so relentless. And because they got this other job where other managers were not seeing the talent, they'd be super thankful.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:17:12)
Yes. [chuckles]

Stéphane Bancel (1:17:13)
Uh, so being an immigrant has shaped me in many, many ways, um, and also has allowed me to be more curious. As I told you earlier, you know, I only started to understand the French culture by being out of it in Japan.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:17:28)
Yes.

Stéphane Bancel (1:17:28)
Um, I think, uh, being an immigrant also was very instrumental is, in my journey at Moderna because it's about going to new places you don't know.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:17:39)
Yes.

Stéphane Bancel (1:17:39)
Uh, you know, we went into an mRNA, uh, space of making medicine that nobody in the world knew. You know, we had stuff that Nobel Prize winner told me will not work. My team might work.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:17:50)
Yes. [clears throat]

Stéphane Bancel (1:17:51)
There was stuff Nobel Prize winner told us will work, still 15 years after don't work. I don't know if it's us cannot make it work or it will never work, or we don't have the right technology in today's time of humanity.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:18:03)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (1:18:03)
So being an immigrant has been really a wonderful gift that, that I had the pleasure to have.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:18:08)
No, I think it's an amazing reflection, and, uh, I was smiling, Stéphane, because myself in, in my former global role at Microsoft, I was the one kind of filtering those accent that many people in Redmond would not [chuckles] necessarily understand or, or accept for a long time, and finding so many amazing talents all across the world, from Asia to Africa to Middle East to the Americas. And so, yeah, that, that rings a bell to me. No, really at the very end, something that people don't necessarily know a lot about you, Stéphane, is your big heart [chuckles] beyond the mission of your company that you obviously, uh, you obviously drive, uh, incredibly. You and your wife, Brenda, you know, you, you've created the Bancel Philanthropies and, and I think, uh, you know, your philosophy as a scientist, you said, "We view love as our most untapped resource." Major gifts I think you've done to the Pulse Foundation, Villanova University for ed-educational equity, to the International Institute of New England for refugees, immigrants, to youth mental health programs, and I'm sure to many more programs. And you also signed the giving pledge for all the listeners who don't know, which means you've been committing your entire Moderna stake to philanthropy.Keeping only your home and your daughter's education and some resources for your family, but giving the rest for, for the future to those causes. Can you tell us more about what drives you and Brenda to the causes you've chosen and the philosophy behind Bancel Philanthropies? 'Cause I wish we had many more Bancel Philanthropies across the world. [laughs] And I know Bill, of course, Bill Gates, when he started that as well with, uh, some time ago. So tell us more about your own journey as a philanthropist.

Stéphane Bancel (1:19:51)
Sure. And just to clarify, Jean-Philippe, we have not signed a giving pledge, but we've said publicly, and you're correct-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:19:56)
Okay

Stéphane Bancel (1:19:56)
... that we're gonna give everything away. I just want for the record to be, be factual.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:19:58)
Okay. Okay. Thanks for clarification. Yes.

Stéphane Bancel (1:20:00)
Sure. So yeah, we said with Brenda we're gonna give everything away, but a tiny bit for education of kids and stuff like that.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:20:07)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (1:20:07)
Because nobody needs that much money, and you have so many problems in the world and people suffering, uh, that we just could not comprehend with Brenda that we'll keep all that money. We are just putting it to use because I have no interest to be the richest guy in the cemetery, um, to do good things for the world. Uh, and so we're trying to do two big chapter. One is really around youth.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:20:32)
Yes.

Stéphane Bancel (1:20:32)
Because, you know, we both got lucky with Brenda to get educated, uh, and as you know, a lot of kids don't have a chance to get an education.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:20:42)
Yes.

Stéphane Bancel (1:20:42)
And so we're doing a lot around helping people from low-income, uh, communities to get access to education, including university. So we have a-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:20:50)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (1:20:50)
... big number of, of, of scholarships, uh, across, across the world.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:20:55)
Yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (1:20:55)
Um, we are also doing a lot of things around mental health because we think it's a serious problem-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:21:00)
Mm

Stéphane Bancel (1:21:00)
... in the youth.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:21:02)
Yes.

Stéphane Bancel (1:21:02)
Of course, also to older people, but especially in the youth, as you know. So we're doing a lot of work, uh, in, in mental health. So youth is a big topic, and the other big topic is people later in li- in life that, uh, are dealing with a lot of harm. And so one of our, uh, philanthropic effort we are super proud about is we are helping, uh, um, Homeboy Industries.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:21:27)
Mm-hmm.

Stéphane Bancel (1:21:27)
It's a non-profit organization in LA started by-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:21:30)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (1:21:30)
... a Jesuit, Father Boyle, who, uh, reinsert in society around ten thousand people a year that are-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:21:37)
Mm

Stéphane Bancel (1:21:37)
... uh, that are former gang members.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:21:40)
Wow.

Stéphane Bancel (1:21:40)
So a lot of them coming out of jail, uh-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:21:42)
Yeah, yeah

Stéphane Bancel (1:21:43)
... he reinsert them, give them a job. He's created a bakery. He's created a lot of businesses to give them jobs to reinsert them in society because as you can imagine, when you leave jail or prison-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:21:51)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (1:21:51)
... sorry, uh, s- a lot of time, your family doesn't want to see you. You have no money. You have no job. You have nothing, and you have, you know, of course, uh, uh, prison history, uh, on your record. So it's not easy.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:22:02)
Yes.

Stéphane Bancel (1:22:03)
Uh, we're helping a group here in Boston, uh, an amazing doctor who is a doctor of the homeless. Literally, he goes in the streets with his team, and they know all the homeless and the disease they have, and they give them medicine. They have medicine in their backpack.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:22:15)
Wow.

Stéphane Bancel (1:22:15)
They follow them and so on.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:22:16)
[clears throat]

Stéphane Bancel (1:22:16)
So we're trying to, to help people in those two big chapters, youth and people that are hurting a lot. Uh, and we're trying to do it by enabling other entrepreneurs. So the foundation is my wife plus one person-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:22:30)
Mm

Stéphane Bancel (1:22:30)
... 'cause we hate staff and overhead and so on.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:22:32)
Bureaucracy. [laughs]

Stéphane Bancel (1:22:33)
Yeah. And so what we're trying to do is to find people that are doing extraordinary social work-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:22:39)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (1:22:39)
... like Father Boyle in, uh, in LA-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:22:42)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (1:22:42)
... and providing to them long runway or visibility of funding. So it's planned-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:22:46)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (1:22:46)
... for many years, usually three to five years. Three when we don't know them well, and then five years, so they can-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:22:52)
Mm

Stéphane Bancel (1:22:52)
... hire and build program like we do in companies.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:22:55)
Yes. [clears throat]

Stéphane Bancel (1:22:55)
Uh, and the other piece we also, uh, do is we provide support to, to organizations to, uh, help them seed new social entrepreneurs. So I'm a big believer-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:23:06)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (1:23:06)
... in social entrepreneurs because-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:23:08)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (1:23:08)
... like entrepreneurs in the business world, they are passionate about their mission.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:23:12)
Oh, yeah.

Stéphane Bancel (1:23:12)
They sweat every detail of a system, and they make the system better over time. Uh-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:23:16)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (1:23:16)
... and so that's what we, we're trying to do with Brenda 'cause we think it's much better for the world that all capital goes toward those, uh, organization than it stays on my bank account.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:23:27)
Yeah. That's amazing, and of course, one day, I hope we have the time to, to have a, a drink together in Boston, Paris, Marseille, maybe Stéphane, to share my own passion as well for philanthropy. Social entrepreneurs, I've got a community of a thousand young, uh, social entrepreneurs in France-

Stéphane Bancel (1:23:41)
Oh, wow

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:23:41)
... that I'm trying to, to go and scale. So all the things you talk about are like music to my ears. [laughs]

Stéphane Bancel (1:23:47)
Wonderful.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:23:48)
Something I'm privileged to spending time on now because I retired from my professional life. So I'm also doing... Anyway, my very last question, Stéphane. When you look back on your career someday, what do you want Moderna's impact to have been?

Stéphane Bancel (1:24:01)
Oh, wow. It's a big question.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:24:03)
And it's a big one. [laughs]

Stéphane Bancel (1:24:04)
Yeah, and you need to kind of framing time-wise because in twenty or fifty-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:24:07)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (1:24:08)
... years is, is different. Uh-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:24:09)
Pick your time horizon. Pick your time horizon.

Stéphane Bancel (1:24:11)
Yeah. So we'll say if we are like ten years from now-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:24:14)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (1:24:14)
... uh, I would love, I would love to, um, have developed, you know, five, ten more vaccines so that-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:24:23)
Yeah

Stéphane Bancel (1:24:23)
... for, for the biggest impact, so that people can get a vaccine and don't get a disease that, uh, will impact their quality of life.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:24:31)
Yes.

Stéphane Bancel (1:24:32)
Uh, I would love that cancer-- that we have had a, a role because as you know, AstraZeneca has a huge role as well. But I, I would like-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:24:39)
Yep

Stéphane Bancel (1:24:39)
... to be a company, uh, that has had a big role in turning cancer into a disease that is not a death sentence anymore.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:24:47)
Mm.

Stéphane Bancel (1:24:48)
As you know-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:24:48)
Wow

Stéphane Bancel (1:24:48)
... because it has happened in your life, it has happened in my life. When you have-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:24:51)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (1:24:51)
... people diagnosed with cancer-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:24:53)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (1:24:53)
... the world kind of falls apart and changes drastically. Thankfully-

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:24:57)
Yes

Stéphane Bancel (1:24:57)
... thanks to the work you guys have done at AstraZeneca and many companies, the, the survival rate is way different than it was ten years ago. But I hope that we're gonna be a big contributor to making sure that we can find cancer earlier, and we can have the right treatment to, uh, help people go back to their normal life and to have cancer, uh, becoming like, you know, when you tell somebody they have diabetes, it's, it's not a great news, but it's not the end of a life news.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:25:25)
Yes. Yes.

Stéphane Bancel (1:25:25)
And I, I hope that all of us working on this and Moderna, uh, in particular, will have a big impact in that space.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:25:31)
Well, that'd be, uh, more than an amazing [laughs] kind of legacy. And my very last, I promise, because we are just on time. In, you know, in a very fast way, as you, as fast as you can, what advice would you give to young scientists today, entre-- or young entrepreneur, young leader who want to make a positive impact in the world? What i- what would be your advice?

Stéphane Bancel (1:25:51)
I think the most important piece is surround yourself with amazing people that share the same mission.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:25:56)
Mm. Yep.

Stéphane Bancel (1:25:56)
'Cause you're gonna have to go through a lot of tough times.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:25:59)
Yep.

Stéphane Bancel (1:25:59)
Same missions, and the most amazing people you can because it's gonna be a lot of hard work.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:26:04)
Yep.

Stéphane Bancel (1:26:04)
And to do great things, you need to be surrounded by great people.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (1:26:08)
I love it. I believe in the power of people, amazing people that elevate ourselves. Stéphane, s- thank you so much for this en- enlightening, inspiring conversation. It's been wonderful. To our listeners, of course, if you have not subscribed to the podcast, please do it. Leave a comment and take care of yourself. Uh, thank you. Merci beaucoup, Stéphane. C'était une conversation superbe.

Stéphane Bancel (1:26:28)
Thank you, Jean-Philippe. Merci.