Hello and welcome to the positive leadership podcast. The podcast that helps you grow as an individual, as a leader, and eventually as a global citizen. I'm Jean Philip Culture and 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 50 person startup built around a radical idea that messenger RNA, long dismissed by many, could transform medicine. Then came 2020 and as a new coronavirus emerged, this team designed a vaccine within days of receiving the genetic sequence. Just 63 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 extend 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 French in France, elected also to the US National Academy of Engineering, recognized as an inventor on more than 45 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 Stefan, a very warm welcome to the positive leadership podcast.
Thank you very much Philip for having me. It's a pleasure.
So Stefan, I always start by asking some question about the background, the early bringing of my guest and your past was anything but conventional I think. I mean you grew up in Marseille with a doctor mother and an engineer father. Your parents split when you were eight, I think, and your education were shaped by the Jesuits, men and women for others, 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 shape the leader you eventually became.
It's a great question, Jean Philip, and it's true 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, were shaped by and I think you touched on all the key of them, maybe a new one I'll share with you. So, of course, my mom is very demanding which I think has stayed with me for a long time. And I think she became even more demanding once my parents divorced because she felt a lot of responsibility to raising my brother and I. The Jesuits have had an amazing impact on me, very profound that I only realized maybe 20, 30 years after and it's for very simple reason as you would appreciate which is I only lived my own life. And so given I went to school since CM, so middle school, to a Jesuit, all the things we'll do in term of education, engagement to the community, helping others and so on just seemed normal to me because I knew nothing else, right? And I think this passion I have for medicine, using our time on this planet to help other people through medicine. Even when I was at bioMérieux, it was still the world of medicine, diagnostic disease. I think so had a very profound impact on me. The other big impact that had on me that I didn't realize until maybe a few years ago is my dad used to love sailing and he was kind of nuts but actually they moved to Marseille from Saint-Étienne because he wanted to sail all the time. So not because of soccer obviously. And it's interesting because we will sail all the time. It'll be raining outside on Christmas day. We'll go sailing. And the piece I realized much later that growing up on the sailboat, it wasn't a big boat. It was a 30 ft, 10 meter boat. Taught me to enjoy adventure. We always go to places we never been before. You know, try to be on the middle because there's no GPS of course when I was a kid on the middle crossing to Corsica and trying during the night to look at the radio and try to do on a map the different axis to figure out where we were roughly. And I think the sea teaches you a few things. I mentioned that to my team last year when as you know we've had quite some challenges with the US administration on science, NIH, vaccine, mRNA and so on and I told my team I said look 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 that end up being sometime bad or very bad. And the second piece is a storm will always go away. You don't know if it's going to be a day, you know, three days. But the storm always end up passing. And I think this side of adventure to be comfortable in the unknown has been critical for me as a CEO of Moderna because as you know there was no mRNA company before. Nobody knew if mRNA was going to work when they decided to join Moderna when it was a one scientist company. Most of my friends told me not to do it because I had a great job at bioMérieux and bioMérieux is a great company. And so I think this sailing also taught me the sense of adventure and dealing with the unknown.
Now wonderful memories that you just share Stefan. I'm curious actually about any legacy as well of maybe in terms of spirituality with the Jesuit, 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.
Oh for sure. And I think again the passion for doing medicine is really helping people. I mean some of the basic Christian beliefs but I think it's true in most religion which is you know being a good person, helping people around you, welcoming people, you know all those basic I would say Christian teaching again that you see in all the big religion have had a huge impact on me. I could not see myself not doing what I'm doing. It's interesting this week, Jean Philip, at one of my weekly lunch meeting with 20 employees selected randomly just to catch up and get feedback from the team. I got asked a question that I've not been asked I think ever. And the question was like if you are not in life science, what would you be doing? And I paused because it never first crossed my mind I would not be in life science. And then I paused I say I will be working for clean energy. Ah, you know, one of the things that I've done recently is I joined the board of a fusion company. Trying to make energy out of fusion. It's called Zap Energy. It's an amazing team out of MIT. And the idea that you could do like a little sun, you know, plasma into a factory and create clean energy without the toxic waste that we have with nuclear energy will be of course amazing. A glass of water will be all the energy I consume for a year which is kind of crazy to think about it including my travel by airplane and so on. And so I think 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.
Well, you're opening even new horizon. I'm not going to open another chapter right now of your life but it looks like there's something there as well. So much to be done. So much.
And the other one is I think on the philanthropic side which I never talk about.
Oh I will ask you some question no worries because that's something of interest for me as well.
No no no for sure I'd like to continue discussion Stefan and your education. I think your education combined elite French engineering at École Centrale Paris with chemical engineering at the 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 engineering. So why were geography and history so important to you and what did they teach you that pure engineering could not?
So it's interesting. So first I was very bad at geography and history when I was young because studying about the past I thought I was not interesting and I'm dyslexic and so remembering geography and so was not something easy because I was not very interested. I became interested more as an adult and read a lot of books and so on and geography is because geography as you know well has a huge impact on history. And I got really the travel bug when I started working in Asia and discovering cultures and people. 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 a French culture when I was out of a French culture by being in Japan. I also learned a lot of great thing about the Japanese culture. Some not so great thing about the Japanese culture and I really got 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. And this time is 18 years. So it's a I've not done the math yet of when I would have lived more in America than actually in France. And so, history is interesting because it teaches you how to think about things and how to think about humans because at the end of the day, business is a group of people working together to do something for other people. And the human interaction, the human psychology, I think, is something really important and very interesting. And I think you can learn a lot from it through history. I love business and so I got into learning about business history. How company were built 50, 100 years ago. 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 but the railroad companies were built across countries when the steam engine was discovered and invented. There was no electricity. So everything was written on paper on notebooks, right? You couldn't pick up a phone and call somebody or send an email. But those massive national enterprise still were run most probably we'll see today very inefficiently but they were run. So I think there's a lot of interesting thing about history that can be used in every day and also as you think about where the world is going because I think as a leader of a company I need to 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.
Yeah. Maybe quickly because you make me think of course of a bigger question Stefan as a leader of very global company by design in a way when a virus gets born and of course we got some news recently in terms of a new virus with the avian virus. Do you see the world more actually decentralized, more deglobalized would some people would say or would you call the world we are going through right now over the last few years?
Yes, I think the world has as you know many more tensions than we used to have 5, 10 years ago. The world is much more polarized. I think personally that technology has played a big role in that polarization that some politician have exploited. On some parts there is more collaboration 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 which seems a bit crazy because one will think almost linearly about where the world is going 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 a huge step forward. Humans have not evolved on this planet in a linear fashion and I think we just at another moment where this is happening.
Yeah, agree with you. So, let's come back to your kind of your learning path because back to your studies. 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. So, I love it obviously, but most engineers would never consider that path. What did you see that others did not see actually?
So it's interesting. So you're correct as in sales and marketing. 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 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 the team at bioMérieux allowed me to do that because it's not the linear path 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.
Yes. So in 2011 you are the successful CEO of bioMérieux right at the time 6,000 employees but billions in revenue recognized as one of the top biotech CEOs in the world at 39. Then Nubar Afeyan called about a tiny startup working on mRNA, a technology that never produced an approved drug. Take us to that moment Stefan when you told your wife you are considering joining that wacky company Moderna and she asked about the chances of success. I think you said around 5%. So why did you say yes? What convinced you to take that enormous risk?
So, it's interesting. As I told you, a lot of my friends and family members told me not to do it, except actually my wife told me to do it. And my wife is interesting. She's not a scientist at all. She's a photographer, creative person by background and now she's running a philanthropy 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. And as I was describing all the challenges and this is where the 5% came as a very low odds of this working. She actually told me you have to do it. And I look at her puzzled say what do you mean I have to do it? She said you are so relentless and bold and stubborn. She added that if it's going to be that hard or that improbable of working, you will find a path. You will get around you the right people, the right team. You will set a culture of relentlessness. You are so obsessed about again going back to Jesuit with peace to doing good for the world, good for people, you will find a path and so you have to do it which became an interesting moment in our marriage was like I think this is crazy. Everybody around me tell me I should not do it, all my coaches, except my wife who by the way is not a business person and doesn't understand science. I'm like okay but I think she had the key sense of a mission of a company at heart 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. The biotech industry Jean Philip as you know was started by Genentech and Amgen in the 70s 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. They come from a biotech technology, biotech industry that 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 think about what medicine you could do, you cannot even think about the medicine that you could do. 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 despite we having amazing drugs including what we did during the pandemic for COVID. I don't think we've invented yet our best drugs. And so as I thought about this arc of innovation and medicine and the impact it could have on people around the planet, I'm like, you have to do it because even the upside is so big for the world that if the downside is we're going to lose some investors money and I'm going to have to find a new job because we were bankrupt and help my team find a new job. That's a very manageable downside. And the asymmetry was so gigantic between the upside and the very manageable downside that it ended up being a very easy decision.
I see. Well, it looks like it was almost like a calling Stefan like a vocation almost coming true.
Almost. Right. Yes. And it became even more after which is interesting because it was more intuitive initially. 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 improving very quickly and so on it became yeah it became almost a calling. Yeah.
So you said that the key insight was that mRNA could access two-thirds 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 diverse backgrounds? What made you so certain that this was the right bet despite those odds actually?
Sure. So to do very simple biology, we have around 22,000 genes in our DNA so instructions for 22,000 proteins. And a third of those proteins are called secreted protein, think about insulin where they made inside the cell like your pancreas from your DNA instruction and once they made inside the pancreas they are secreted, they are delivered outside of the cells of the pancreas and they go into your bloodstream do their business. Well, two-thirds of the protein in every cell are to make your cell function. Think about yourself like a town with a lot of different jobs. You have a police and 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-thirds of a protein in that cells never leave the cell. And so if you make a protein in bacteria like the biotech industry does or 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 go inside human cells and so the entire world of protein staying inside cells is just unaddressable, undoable using recombinant biotech technology. And so because in the case of mRNA the protein is made inside the cells. Once we bring the mRNA we make in the factory inside your cell like we did for COVID, we are right there and so we can make any protein inside the cells that we want which is the fun part of the science.
Well thanks for opening our eyes and our brains about the potential those two. Now let's dig into it. I mean January 2020. I'm sure that's a time a day to you still remember vividly your vacation in Salernes, France maybe close to Marseille. I don't know you're going to tell us 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 people show you data on their phones, human-to-human transmission, flights to every corner of the world. You return to your hotel and think this is not SARS, it's going to be the 1918 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?
Sure. So it's interesting to go back in time. So I was made aware of the virus as you said during the Christmas break by reading the newspaper. I reached out to Tony Fauci's team at the National Institute of Health in the US, the NIH. And they were monitoring the situation. They clearly were aware already before the news, the reporter of the Wall Street Journal was aware 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 going to be like SARS or MERS or a local outbreak and then it will go away. But I wanted to prove to ourselves, to myself and to Tony Fauci that we could go in a clinic in 60 days which was what I told him before in 2019 that he didn't believe me could be done because when SARS happened it took the NIH, Tony had told me 20 months to go to the clinic. And when I told him we could do it in two months of course he didn't believe the guy with French funny accent. Plus I'm not even a biologist, not even a PhD. So, think about it. What credibility do I have 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. And Tony Fauci will run the clinical trial. We will have proven we can in case something really bad happened one day do that in 60 days. And then I'm in Davos and I'm monitoring the cases on my laptop. I build an Excel spreadsheet by country. And the R, you know that everybody has learned now which is the pace of contamination of people, people transmission seems really really high and as I spent time in Davos with a few people including Jeremy Farrar who is now the chief scientific officer of WHO. He was running the Wellcome Trust before. It becomes very clear that the R is very very different from SARS or MERS. And then the piece as we discussed with Jeremy because we will meet a couple times a day between meeting at Davos just to catch up. So, a few things then happened on the Wednesday of Davos. I don't if you remember the Chinese government decide to close Wuhan. 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. I know most people in France or others had not heard of Wuhan before. But Wuhan is a very big industrial city. And then one of the thing I had done at Davos when I started to get more and more worried is I had look at all the flights leaving Wuhan, direct flights. And I had to realize that every capital in Asia direct flight from Wuhan, every capital in Europe and every big cities on the west coast of the US. And as I look at the R and the incubation time which you know was estimated at the time seven to 10 days and the travel and number of flights I went back in time even to when I read the article between Christmas and New Year and just calculate how many people could have been contaminated with no symptoms and I've left one. And the number was so gigantic that it became very clear that this was going to be like 1918 which again connecting the dots why studying history is helpful because I knew how bad 1918 had been when we had the Spanish flu which by the way didn't come from Spain, poor Spanish, came out of Russia. And so that's the week where I pivoted, started Wednesday or Thursday night. I forgot now of that week to realize this is going to be like 1918 and I need to change my plan because my old plan is wrong. It's obsolete.
Yeah. And so as you said I think it was 63 days later right after that genetic sequence was posted online that the first human receive a dose which is 10 times faster than any vaccine history. Can you actually lead us through your organization? How did you do that to accomplish something that never happened before in such a record time?
Yes. So I would say there's some piece that are linked to the technology. It has nothing to do with my organization. It's just mRNA and a piece of what we had built. So a few things. So mRNA because it's an information molecule. I can make another vaccine on the computer in two minutes as long as I have a sequence. I literally copy and paste it to a cassette that we built before and we had done which most people didn't know nine vaccine in clinical trial before January 2020. So we have done a lot of different constructs never coronavirus but we've done flu, Zika, a few other viruses. And then the other piece we had done for cancer which is why this platform is so interesting because you can connect the dots in ways that are science fiction like for traditional pharma. For our cancer treatment which I hope we can talk about in a moment. Yes. We had had to develop a manufacturing machine to do individualized product for one human at a time. So we shrunk everything 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 because in vaccine the dose are much lower per human than in cancer. So you could make for the 60 or 70 people of a phase one study, you could make the entire batch. And that process I knew could take 30 days. So it took us around 30 days from mid January we got the sequence to make the product. And then it was the 30 days for the FDA to review the file to authorize Tony Fauci's team to start dosing human with a green light from the FDA.
But I think then really come the real problem or well 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 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.
Yeah and that was a long storm it was a couple month storm where I tried everywhere I could to raise money. I talked to every big foundation in the world didn't get a penny. The biggest one I call them three, four, five times. I even told them I will put a factory just for low-income countries. But please help me. Got not a penny. Nothing. I asked big pharma company, all the big vaccine players. They decided not to work with us. And what actually ended up saving us which is an interesting calendar from the capitalism system. It's actually it's a public market who saved me. So what happened in May 2020 we knew the clinical data were coming over phase one. And because we couldn't find money anywhere. Big pharma not helping, foundations not helping us either. The government was starting in the US to help us because in the meantime Congress had passed some budget for clinical trial. So the US was helping us as has been well documented. We got more than a billion dollar from the US government to pay for the clinical studies 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 raise. And one of the amazing thing that happened is Morgan Stanley was one of our bank and James Gorman the CEO is retired now. Morgan Stanley called me on the Sunday and said you cannot waste time on a road show. Your vaccine is working. The team told me you're going to do a fundraising and a road show next week. You cannot. It's a waste of your time. The bank will buy everything. What? And he's like, you know, James, it's more than 1.3, 1.4 billion dollar. He's like, I know. He's like, we'll buy everything. We'll put it on our 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 road show. It would be criminal now that you have 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 and James is a great man. Morgan Stanley basically took the entire when the market closed on Monday at 4:01. We signed the transaction. They got everything all the stock. We got over cash and then we were able to use that capital to buy machine, to buy raw material, to hire people to could scale manufacturing because I think the media has done an amazing job during 2020 to cover all the different vaccine by all the companies. But what the media has never really done is a story about the incredible industrial challenge which was to go from no manufacturing capacity to a billion doses 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.
No, I think it's an amazing story and what you just called that as well because we don't necessarily talk much about finance, investing into well I'm not even calling that a it's not a private equity but really a bet, a huge human bet.
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 organization which was not necessarily backed up by many of his shareholders, but he just bet on you and Moderna and you did it. So that's.
Yeah. Which is also fascinating to build on your point because again, as I said, big foundations around the world said no. Which you will think a foundation there's a pandemic, people dying, they're going to be helpful, said no. And big pharmaceutical companies that were the biggest players in vaccine in the space said no as well. And it's a public market and a bank who helped us.
So continuing on this story and accelerating a bit on this one Stefan in July 2020 you started your phase three trial but you are not enrolling I think enough people from diverse backgrounds, African-Americans, Latinos, the communities that were I think and 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 I 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 popular among others people.
Yeah, it's a great point. It was most probably the most difficult decision I made in 2020. It was very painful. We debated it for around a week and then like we cannot keep debating. We need to decide and is 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 every company gets. We had mostly white people to be simple. And because we wanted this vaccine to be a vaccine for the world not a vaccine for white people. 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 told some site we had recruited mostly white people you cannot get any more people into the study and we added new site in communities where there were people of color. It was agonizing it was even organizing at the end because as you say people were dying. And then you know we ended up having a product approved one week before Pfizer and they really twisted it in our back saying they were the first product approved and so on and we're 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. Very happy I made I hope I will make the same decision again if it was presented to me because at the end of the day it was me and the team debating it and with a board because it became at some stage a board discussion with my recommendation to slow down because we wanted this to be a vaccine for the world, not for white people.
No, wonderful decision, very principled decision and fantastic Stefan. And we'll come back in a few minutes another question when it comes to another I think big issue for medicine and pharma 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. So your melanoma vaccine, mRNA-4157, developed with Merck I think is now in phase three trials and showing a 49% if I'm correct reduction in recurrence risk and your automated laboratory, advanced automation robotics delivers a personalized vaccine in under 30 days from tumor sequencing to treatment. Can you help our listeners again understand 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?
Sure. So I'm going to try to be very simple and any doctor scientist 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 are so important, your immune system, which basically lives in your blood and goes around your body, will see that first cancer cell and will eat it. Again, massive simplification of what's happening. If a cancer can grow because for example you spend a period of your time you go through a divorce, you have a big trauma in your life where you don't sleep for a month or two you see sometime five, 10 years after people having cancer but it started at that moment. So if your cancer grows your immune system becomes blind to it because it becomes used to it. It's part of 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. And we read all the letters of the DNA of your tumor the 3 gigabytes of letter. We do the same on a draw of blood to get the DNA of a healthy cell of your body. So we can know what is Jean Philip DNA and we compare via informatics all the mutation where all the letters has changed 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 are the most relevant. And we make one mRNA with all those 34 mutation in one molecule in the factory in 30 days. And when we inject it in your arm in your hospital, what we've shown is after around four doses, because remember your immune system missed the mutation in your cancer. After around four doses, we start to see your immune system recognizing your cancer. It's waking up to your cancer 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 design of a vaccine on a 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. We'll make a molecule for Jean Philip. We'll make a different molecule for Stefan that in each case is adapted 100% like a hand to a glove of the right size to your tumor and to my tumor.
So is the envision Stefan that at the end of the day you'll be producing billions of dollars but one dose at a time for one person, one individual on the planet to cure cancer.
That's the way. 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. We're going to start our first stage one testing because in lung cancer you can find cancer early. If you do an X-ray of a former smoker, you can find a cancer early and we think that would be even more powerful because there's less disease. And there so you have a stronger immune system. 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 that's going to 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 tremendously that chance of having colon cancer. And so in that case when you develop yet another product where we're going to give you instruction so that the cancer will not develop. So it's a prevention of cancer. So there's a lot of things that we're able to do with this technology because as I said it's an information technology in your body and our 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 tools to fight disease.
No it's amazing and also incredibly exciting to think about the opportunity for the world. And coming back to this kind of the challenge you had with COVID right in terms of manufacturing that must be mind-boggling in a sense again of all those individual doses produced. So are you solving many of that manufacturing puzzle?
Yeah. So we are trying to scale out the process by shrinking everything. So if you were to go and visit our Marlborough factory in Massachusetts in the US, what you will see is a lot of engineers trying to shrink everything smaller and smaller and smaller because if I can make more per square foot on the floor or square meter. 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're now ready to go commercial because we're hoping to get the data this year and to launch a product next year in 27. We've already reduced by 10x the size on the floor and the team has a road map for another 10x. So of course that will be 100x. And we're trying to also shrink the manufacturing time because if I can do something in one day versus five days, of course I can do five times more, right? This is a basic math. And so we just obsess about the output and think what are all the variables we have. That's why being an engineer comes handy. 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.
