Flagship Pioneering

And in my epidemiologist brain said, "I cannot assess the risk," when I was being asked by the national press, "Is the risk, how concerned should Americans be?" The answer people want is risk is low or high, but actually it's not a phenomenon of risk, it's a phenomena of uncertainty.

In other words, risk, my, my colleague at Flagship Pioneering, Noubar Afeyan, who has been a legendary scientist and entrepreneur, he describes it in the following way: "Risk is calculable, uncertainty is not." I wish I'd known that before I [chuckles] had to go out and, and explain to the American public what the risk was.

I don't know it would've been satisfying 'cause certainly the answer oversimplified, "Hey, the risk to the American public is low." I, I don't know what that means.

So there's, there's really, it sounds like there's really two jobs that you're doing at this time.

CEO of a healthcare startup that's using, you know, combining healthcare and AI.

It's part of an amazing company called Flagship Pioneering, which is sort of an incubator of companies.

And one of the companies they incubated was Moderna.

So anyway, it's really cool to see what these women are doing, but...

When, when something strange happens, as is happening with a dangerous pathogen in Russia at the moment, the questions become, can we detect it fast? Can we figure out where it came from and respond in the open? AI is about to make that question and those questions harder and also easier to answer.

And what I mean by that is we have, on the one hand, AI that I see every day at my work at Flagship Pioneering, where we create life science companies, being used to develop the next vaccine and the next, next treatment against infectious diseases, against cancer.

Uh, and, and it turns out some of the same AI and biology tools we use to develop those innovations that benefit humanity can be used to harm humanity if AI is used to design a biological weapon.

And of course, you point out some of the AI models in this past month did report that there may be some biological misuse of their AI model.

Well, well, well, and, and it, and it's almost, uh...

A- and we, we, we had, uh, Avek Kovachian, uh, who's, does the incubating, which is what Flagship Pioneering ultimately became, right?

Yeah.

Um, is, you know, almost solely that, that incubation.

My guest today believes that's because AI alone was never going to be the answer.

Valo, the biotech founded by Flagship Pioneering, is betting on a different approach, combining AI, predictive chemistry, and crucially, real-world human data from the very start of drug discovery, using access to more than 17 million longitudinal patient records, some spanning 20 years.

That approach has already attracted major partners, including a Parkinson's collaboration with EMD Serono, worth up to 3 billion, and a cardiometabolic disease partnership with Novo.

Joining me to talk about it is Valo's CEO, Brian Alexander, a former practicing radiation oncologist whose years treating patients with aggressive brain tumors helped shape his mission to reimagine how we discover medicines.

And why do you think those differences exist? So why do you think immigrant entrepreneurs behave differently, think differently, prioritize differently?

Well, I think they are driven, first of all, and another thing it was interesting to me when I interviewed, uh, in the book I profiled the founder of Calendly and, uh, Noubar Afeyan, the founder of Moderna and Flagship Pioneering, and it was interesting because the same thing happened to me as well.

Th- they had been...

Noubar Afeyan had been in US from his, uh, Armenian Lebanese, he had been in US since he was a, a young boy.