Moderna Cofounder Noubar Afeyan Is Afraid of Everything—And That’s His Genius

How does it feel to be one of the people who ended the COVID pandemic?

Well, one, I would say objectively that ending the pandemic was a pretty substantial effort by a lot of people, just within Moderna itself. It really took a gigantic team effort. But if you’re asking about being a part of one of the few entities, as founder and chairman, I would say it’s a great privilege. It’s a very fortunate thing to be given the opportunity to apply science to do such a thing. I’ve worked for the past 38 years, making innovations and creating companies that can have some kind of impact, and I could’ve worked another 38 years and not had that kind of impact. But the circumstances were such and the odds played out in a way that our science and our approach turned out to produce an effective vaccine, and that contributed greatly, not entirely but greatly, to ending the pandemic.

What’s the thing you’re most frightened of in an existential way?

On a professional level? We spend all of our time thinking about life as though we were molecules inside of it, and we imagine or dream up all sorts of diseases, all sorts of ways to go after them. They’re all saturatingly scary, because we only work on them if they’re really debilitating, whether it’s Alzheimer’s, or various forms of cancer, or an infectious disease like COVID. But there are many others.

How about on a personal level?

Having lost two parents to cancer, it continues to be a haunting feeling that the very nature of cells, which is their evolutionary tendency to mutate, can be turned against the body they’re in. Cancer is a pure disease of evolution. I’d probably say cancer is high on my list of things that I fear, in the sense that we don’t yet have ways to catch it in its earliest forms. And obviously, I’m saying all this because we’re working on that, applying our mRNA technology quite encouragingly toward that end, but it’s gonna take a lot of continued research, innovation, and ingenuity.

So you do think it’s possible at some point in the future to come up with a vaccine for cancer?

Well, let me say it slightly differently, because people misunderstand vaccines. There are prophylactic vaccines that prevent infection. There are vaccines that mitigate the progression of a disease and its most severe forms, which is often what happens with flu and COVID, and many others. And then there are ways to prime the immune system to go and find a disease that is not an infection. We view what we’re doing with mRNA as a form of immunotherapy that rather than delivering antibodies, delivers a set of messages that causes our T-cells to go after the cancer, which is fundamentally different from the premise of vaccines, because you have to already have the disease to benefit from it. So I will just say that yes, I definitively think that over time, sooner in some cases, maybe later in others, we will be able to message our immune system to do its job to fight cancer.

Is mRNA our greatest hope for attacking disease, or is there an equally promising alternative technology or approach?

That’s an interesting question, given that in the summer of 2010, we literally fantasized over a molecule like mRNA even being deliverable to a cell inside the human body. When our bodies see a molecule of RNA, unless it’s properly packaged and protected, it will just trigger our immune response, so we had to figure out how to get rid of that. I say all that because it would be hard for me to sit here and say mRNA is the last molecule that will be able to do that, when in fact, 15 years ago, nobody believed we could do it. Five years ago, even. So I do think that there will be lots of improvements and other approaches that will continue to advance, as long as the need exists.

Diana Levine

Care to comment on the attack by RFK Jr. on the development and use of mRNA vaccines?

I think that mRNA has many scientific advantages that were fully born out in the testing that was done during COVID, the beneficiaries of which are the future generations of vaccine recipients, whether it’s for RSV or flu, or other diseases, and the more we learn, the more we can optimize for efficacy and reduced side effects. Having said that, to your specific question, I think that science is subject to debate and discussion, but facts need to be respected, and I don’t think they’re a matter of opinion.

What would you say to someone who’s not exposed to those facts and who is a vaccine skeptic? How do you reassure them?

In my life, the way I approach areas that I’m not an expert in, where I haven’t spent enough time or mastered the content, is that I’ve availed myself of the expertise that’s out there, preferably entities that have historically been charged with doing this work in delivering the best recommendations, or medical associations. I follow the collective wisdom that exists. And by the way, I’ll mention parenthetically that often vaccine skeptics are highly educated, and they use their knowledge to question certain things in areas that are not exactly in their area of expertise. I’ve observed medical doctors who have different views, for instance.

Then who should we trust?

Let me share one thing that I do worry about. You asked what scares me, and I’ll tell you. What scares me about this topic is that there’s no limit to how far we can be skeptics. With vaccines or cancer treatments or every other therapy, there is opinion. There is judgment. There is the FDA, which has made a risk-reward trade-off. And I worry as a society about what happens if tomorrow we have metabolism skeptics or bacteria skeptics. And before you say, “No, that’s different,” I don’t know what the difference is, because it says all medicine and medical guidance or practice should be subject to opinion. I’ve done this for a long time, and I think it’s important that we maintain a level of objectivity, group analysis, and debate, versus rendering things out of opinion.

Is a vaccine ever worse than the disease?

Hidden within that question is that an individual’s experience with a vaccine or a treatment is not what a regulator assesses. It’s the collective, population-level effect of it. So people experience things that are completely within the bounds of a regulated substance, because the overall benefit far outweighs the individual’s sometimes known, sometimes unknown effects. That’s the case with every vaccine, or intervention, or medical treatment, that involves humans. However, I don’t think that there are approved vaccines that are worse than the disease—because if they were, they wouldn’t be approved.

Who is the person you admire the most?

Scientifically, probably Charles Darwin. I’m trained as an engineer but did science for the rest of my life, and the notion that there’s a paradigm of innovation that happens in nature, in human thought, in marketplaces, is a fairly profound thing. Flagship’s entire mechanism rests on that observation.

Do you consider yourself primarily a scientist, inventor, CEO, or entrepreneur?

You got me there. I do consider myself an amalgam of all of those, and it’s the basis on which I can go from ideation to impact. If you’re one of those, there are a lot of hand-offs, and what we’ve tried to be is inventors who can bring the concept to practical reality, which takes those other things. I worked hard at being, if not great, then good enough at each, so that I can be great at combining them.

You have more than 100 patents in your name. Which are you most proud of?

Well, some of the early patents that led to the formation of Moderna are important from an impact standpoint. The very first patents I worked on 38 years ago, I just recently learned, have achieved sales at a peak of about $4 or $5 billion—unbeknownst to me, because I sold the company in 1998. I’m proud of that. One invention I regret not seeing commercialized yet is a modification to cyanobacteria, a blue-green algae, that allows us to take carbon dioxide from air and sunlight and convert that into diesel fuel. That remains very promising.

What’s your biggest indulgence?

What gives me the greatest happiness historically is basketball. I’ve played since I was five or six years old. I know indulgence is supposed to be extravagance, though, so I guess one look at me and you can see that I have quite a few food indulgences. I come from the Middle East, and as an Armenian, there are a lot of foods I indulge in.

Where is the best Armenian food in Boston?

I’m blessed to have a lot of Armenian friends who are excellent cooks, and that’s probably the best, but from a restaurant standpoint, I’d say Anoush’ella, which is owned by my friend and his wife. It’s excellent.

You’ve been honored numerous times as a distinguished and invaluable immigrant. Any thoughts on the current dialogue surrounding immigrants and immigration?

I think, in a nutshell, that immigration, above every other thing in this country, is the biggest contributor to its sustainable success. It’s a regenerative process, and anyone I’ve ever met here in the United States, whether it’s five generations or one, was an immigrant. At the edges, immigration can’t be an uncontrolled, unregulated process. We have to ensure that it’s done within the bounds of what the law will allow. But the importance and relevance of immigrants is completely beyond question, in my view.

Headline you’d most like to read?

There are so many. I dream a lot. I’d love to read a headline that objectively showed a reduction of C02 levels in the atmosphere. Or that poverty levels have been reduced substantially for the 20th year in a row. If I read that people were holding genocidal regimes accountable. I care a lot about that. Famine ending. Unfortunately, there’s a saying that my late friend Vartan Gregorian used to quote: “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero,” so any of those will do.

Any desire for a Nobel Prize?

I have no desire for a Nobel Prize.

You’ve been at this for 25 years. What does the next 25 years look like?

Over 25 years, I’ve learned that you can’t predict the future. You can only decide what kind of future you want to live in and do your best to build it. Right now, I think the biggest opportunity we have is using AI to accelerate science. For a long time, humans thought of our own intelligence as the only intelligence. But now we’ve seen that there is such a thing as machine intelligence, and that should give us cause to also recognize what I think of as nature’s intelligence, or the logic of the natural world. When we bring these three intelligences into conversation with each other, we get what I call “polyintelligence,” and that interaction will revolutionize how we do science in ways we can’t even imagine yet. It will help us get to solutions for the biggest challenges humans face—disease, hunger, climate change—much more quickly and more effectively. And for that reason, I think the future is bright.

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By the Numbers

The Afeyan Effect

Noubar Afeyan has secured patents, launched companies, and founded charities that are changing the world.

100+

Number of life-sciences companies Afeyan has founded.

177

Number of patents in which Afeyan appears as one of the inventors.

30

Number of companies founded by Flagship Pioneering that have had IPOs.

1.2 billion

Afeyan’s net worth, in dollars, according to Forbes’ real-time tracker.

63

Number of countries and territories whose citizens have been supported by the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative, one of the foundations Afeyan cofounded.

This article was first published in the print edition of the October 2025 issue with the headline: “The King of Kendall.”

Previously

• The Interview: Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel