How exciting to be here with two amazing panelists. So I want to quickly introduce Dr. Majid, CEO of King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center, and Noubar Afeyan, co-founder of Moderna and also the founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering. So I'm so excited because both of you have spent time in Boston and I live in Boston. So, you know, and we're talking about a topic that's very home to Boston, biotech, right? So, and I'm going to start with a question which is, you know, you guys obviously spend time in this square. It's called Kendall Square. And I get this question a lot. How can we take Kendall Square and replicate it across the globe? So, and what would it take? So I'll start with Dr. Majid and then maybe we'll go to Noubar to you.
Thank you Salman. Great to be here and great to sit with two Bostonians. Reminded me of my time in training when I was in Boston. Kendall Square is a success story and it's difficult to replicate, however, not impossible. When we set our strategy in the healthcare sector and during this transformation of the whole country, we realized that in order to get top-rated hospitals, to get top-rated healthcare, and I head a hospital and that is my primary focus, we really have to invest in research and research leads to biotechnology and that's where we should go. And attempts previously to build a research center 50 years ago in King Faisal Specialist Hospital has generated papers, has generated science, but not really moved to the biotechnology. So it is important to build the ecosystem into a biotechnology push. We are helped by development of the whole ecosystem, the biotechnology strategy, which is a national strategy, and we learned the cases that were done elsewhere. Kendall Square was a pull from the market, commercial, and it's hard for me to talk about Kendall Square with presence of one of the leaders there, but it's created with a pull from the market, commercial, academia created this wonderful park which has produced a lot of good to humanity. But there are other models that have generated similar. In China we see the Shenzhen park where it is focused in cell and gene therapy, harnessing the manpower, the science, the population, the data. And in Singapore there is another model where they chose the sort of focused positioning, strategic direction to make sure to build and that has now contributed to 6% in the GDP. So answer to your question, it is possible, difficult, not impossible though.
Right, well thank you Dr. Majid. Noubar, so you live in Kendall Square, I mean you've created companies in Kendall Square, you still have companies right? So what's your take, is this replicatable?
So thanks for having me. Yeah, so I've been in the Cambridge biotech world since 1983 and did my PhD there and then started a company in '87 and haven't really left. And I've watched that ecosystem really emerge. And one thing I'll say to you is that the Kendall Square type of ecosystem or Silicon Valley was not constructed. It was essentially emergent. And the advantage of emergence is that each time it happens, it happens in its own way. The disadvantage is that it's very hard to replicate the emergent form. I'll come back to what I think is another form which is a constructed form. And there are big differences you need to think about, any more than for example you can have a forest that happens naturally or you can put up a forest and you got to think about a planned forest very differently than a random forest in the Amazon. I give a lot of talks about this topic because we get asked this question a lot and just for it to be maybe memorable to people, I find since this is in Cambridge, Massachusetts that the letter C ties together a lot of the things that it takes. It takes a level of competition, collaboration, community, capital, commitment, all sorts of things happen to be with letter C and you need all of those. And so it's really hard to kind of mix it together like the cappuccino that was being made just now. You know, it's not that. It really is. You have to think about why do you want an ecosystem and in 2025 should you copy an ecosystem that started emerging in the late 90s or should you actually say what's the new way of building it? And I think for this country, a combination of an emergent and a designed or let's say much more rapidly developing ecosystem would be better and we can talk about that because we're trying to help think through how to do that.
Great. Well, Dr. Majid, your perspective was it's hard but possible. Noubar, your perspective is it's hard but yet you can do it better actually what you said. So I think that's amazing. I mean it's a great perspective and I think the opportunity, the way the more I think about it, the opportunity is there to do it better, learnings from Kendall Square and then even in the US they've tried to replicate it in Research Triangle, not as successful, Austin Texas successful but not as successful, San Diego did take off, you know. So but I think at the end of the day I think obviously this region definitely has a huge opportunity to do it better than what Kendall Square was done. So great, great perspective.
I'll add to that. And yes, there is, I mean it's not a cookbook or a blueprint where you have to follow step one playbook.
It's not a playbook. Exactly. I was looking for that word. Thank you very much. It's not a playbook.
But it's rather driven by a combination by the need of the market, capitalizing on the resources, and also a direction. And I think that is one of the strongest points we have here in the transformation is we have the political will, we have the north star, we have the direction, we have the strategy. And seeing that, I witnessed all forces, all stakeholders coming together in order to create that ecosystem. Now, I would argue that at Kendall Square it happened successfully by sort of force of nature, things getting together based on needs. Here we designed the need and it's both pull of the market and push of the government, sort of encompassed in a strategy that's aiming toward having us as a prominent global biotechnology hub by 2040.
And Noubar, anything from the risk perspective? What risk do you see in what we're doing here and what Saudi is doing? Well, maybe if it's okay, maybe we stick with kind of like what does it take because we'll get to risk. There's always risk in everything you try to do that's not easy or done already.
So I would say one thing I would suggest is that in thinking about an ecosystem, so it's kind of ironic, a year ago I was at the FII meeting and in a smaller stage, Life Sciences had put together this dedicated life science side conference and they put me on the spot and they said okay well if you could decide how would you build an ecosystem here? And I was not prepared to answer but I answered anyway. And what I told them just impulsively is that in 2024, then I wouldn't think of it as I said before to replicate. And the analogy I gave is it's a little bit like having a garden. If you have a garden with grass and flowers, which is what the startup kind of ecosystem mentality that has existed in other places, Singapore, London, Israel, different places have had this, we'll start a lot of companies and then they'll all grow. The reality is in the life science space, large companies have not come out of those small companies with very few exceptions in the US, in San Francisco, a little bit LA, and in Boston. That's it. You have a very hard time finding that. And so what I told them by analogy is should you build your garden by having the grass and the flowers but also a tree? And do you think about planting a tree which is a different life form altogether but it can organize the ecosystem very differently based on need, right? As opposed to, so the analogy I'll also give or the direction I'd give is you can either build things in the present and accept the future that comes from it or you can build things in the present to achieve the future that you're planning. And here, because of the Vision 2030 and the 2040 biotech hub kind of aspirations, I think it's a good idea to think through what could this become. Now that is usually limited in that people say well I don't know anything about biotech and we don't have a biotech ecosystem and we don't, so you start listing all the things you don't have and you lower your expectations. That's not a good idea, let alone for a country like this that has very high aspirations. So I would say that what is the catalyst in between all this is AI. In the 38 years I've been involved in starting companies in biotech, the last six, seven years and the introduction of generative AI and all things AI into the scientific process, let alone clinical development, is a complete step-change, game changer. And so the question in my view, there will be biotech before AI and there'll be biotech after AI. And so the ecosystem you want to build is not an ecosystem for biotech before AI where it's very artisanal, people stare at molecules for years at a time to come up with some improvements. You might as well just do the experiment a thousand times using a computer to guide the experiment, interpret the data. And so before people in this audience think that's a fantasy, it's happening in every other sector but health, and I think in healthcare it's just about to begin to change. So I would build, especially with a company like Humane being here, I would build an ecosystem that is predicated, it's like a digital versus analog, the digital version of biotech which we've talked about for a long time, bioinformatics, human genome sequence, all these omics, all of that is going to be completely overwhelmed by when you can use machine intelligence. And so I would say accept machine intelligence as the new standard, build on top of that and somewhat bet on the fact that that is a completely different type of development project than if you were trying to copy something that was analog. That's what I would suggest.
