Speaker 1: School of humans. Growing up in Japan, Shinya Yamanaka broke
Speaker 1: bones all over his body. He cracked them practicing judo
Speaker 1: and snapped them playing rugby. So when he became a
Speaker 1: doctor in nineteen eighty seven, he chose orthopedic surgery to
Speaker 1: fix the broken bones of other athletes like himself, who
Speaker 1: treated their bodies like crash test dummies. He was obviously
Speaker 1: no dummy, but Yamanaka wasn't a very good surgeon either,
Speaker 1: and he saw a lot of patients that he couldn't
Speaker 1: help with the scalpel, Like his own father, who had
Speaker 1: died of liver cirrhosis. Only research and new discoveries could
Speaker 1: lead to their cures. Yamanaka changed paths, moving from the
Speaker 1: operating table to the laboratory. Twenty years later, after many failures,
Speaker 1: Yamanaka made one of the biggest discoveries in the history
Speaker 1: of science. When we first start to form, you're just
Speaker 1: a bunch of identical immature cells. As we grow, those
Speaker 1: cells divide and multiply into different specialized cells like skin cells,
Speaker 1: nerve cells, muscle cells, and brain cells. In two thousand
Speaker 1: and six, Yamanaka discovered that these mature cells could be
Speaker 1: reprogrammed to an immature state, and once the cells were
Speaker 1: in an immature state, they could then be grown into
Speaker 1: whatever types of cells were needed. He called these cells
Speaker 1: induced pluripotent stem cells or IPS cells. Pluripotent basically means
Speaker 1: that their cells that can become any other type of cell.
Speaker 1: By adding just four genes into the skin cells of mice,
Speaker 1: Yamanaka could reprogram them into immature cells that were just
Speaker 1: like embryonic stem cells, cells that resemble those from an embryo.
Speaker 1: As one article put it, it was like biological time travel.
Speaker 1: Want to turn a skin cell into a muscle cell,
Speaker 1: to help regrow a lost limb, Want to replace a
Speaker 1: failing kidney. Now scientists had a place to start, and
Speaker 1: that was only one of a million things that could
Speaker 1: be done for human health with Yamanaka's reprogrammed cells. On
Speaker 1: this episode of a Long Shot, we'll talk to one
Speaker 1: scientist so inspired by Yamanaka's discovery that it changed the
Speaker 1: entire course of his life. He'd go on to start
Speaker 1: a little company called Maderna. We'll also talk about lipid nanoparticles,
Speaker 1: the protective shell of the mRNA vaccines, and last we'll
Speaker 1: hear about the role that Jennifer Andison's hair played in
Speaker 1: this whole story from My Heart Radio and School of Humans.
Speaker 1: I'm sean revive and this is long shot. The world
Speaker 1: found out about Shinya Yamanaka's discovery on June thirtieth, two
Speaker 1: thousand and six, when he gave a talk in Toronto
Speaker 1: at an annual meeting of the International Society for Stem
Speaker 1: Cell Research. The researchers in the room knew this was
Speaker 1: a huge announcement. If Yamanaka could create embryonic like cells
Speaker 1: in a mouse, then he can also do it in
Speaker 1: a person. That could lead to nearly unlimited enhancements in
Speaker 1: human health. I remember being in the audience and just
Speaker 1: being blown away by his presentation. That's Canadian scientist Derek ROSSI.
Speaker 1: The study is one that I returned to. I've read
Speaker 1: it many times. I mean, it's really fantastic. We're talking
Speaker 1: over zoom. He's wearing red rounded Andy warholesque glasses and
Speaker 1: a black David Bowie T shirt. It's not the picture,
Speaker 1: but it's a picture from the cover of Ziggy Stardust.
Speaker 1: Derek is fifty five years old, but looks a bit younger,
Speaker 1: with slick back fashionably graying dark hair. He's the CEO
Speaker 1: of Convelo Therapy X, a company based in Cleveland. They
Speaker 1: do work on multiple sclerosis. His parents were first generation Canadians.
Speaker 1: They immigrated from Malta right after World War Two. His
Speaker 1: dad worked at autobody shops and his mom ran a
Speaker 1: daycare center. It was not a science family, but he
Speaker 1: had a brother with an absolutely crazy love for wild animals,
Speaker 1: and the house was filled with them. We literally had,
Speaker 1: you know, an endless parade of really exotic animals marched
Speaker 1: through our house, you know, from a great horned owl
Speaker 1: we had, you know, as a pet in the home,
Speaker 1: a raccoon, squirrel, you name the snake species, we had it.
Speaker 1: We had a cayman brought he brought home an and eater. So,
Speaker 1: of course Derek wanted to be a veterinarian until I
Speaker 1: took a molecular biology course. Well it's a greade eleven
Speaker 1: biology in high school. My teacher started to teach us
Speaker 1: about molecular biology. He had just come out of college
Speaker 1: and it was the early days of molecular biology, and
Speaker 1: he started telling us about DNA replication and mRNA and
Speaker 1: protein synthesis. Derek was hooked. He trained as a molecular
Speaker 1: biologist at the University of Toronto, then moved to Helsinki,
Speaker 1: Finland to get a PhD. He did a fellowship at
Speaker 1: Stanford on stem cell biology, and then soon after he
Speaker 1: heard that lecture about Shinya Yamanaka, he moved to Harvard
Speaker 1: to teach. So if you took a skin cell, which
Speaker 1: normally would live its whole hyphasis skin cell and wouldn't
Speaker 1: turn into anything else, now Yamanaka could turn it into
Speaker 1: something that cell type. Now that could become a hard cell,
Speaker 1: or a brain cell, or a liver cell. So Yamanaka
Speaker 1: publishes his paper and then the whole world is all
Speaker 1: of a sudden using this technology to make pluripotent stem
Speaker 1: cells to study disease and drug mechanisms and tissue engineering.
Speaker 1: It's an enormous leap in medicine. It was that pervasive
Speaker 1: and that applicable to so many different aspects of the
Speaker 1: work that many different biologists were doing, from you know,
Speaker 1: studying cell identity, to modeling disease in a dish, to
Speaker 1: screening for therapeutics to move the needle on a particular disease.
Speaker 1: When Derek started his own lab in two thousand and seven,
Speaker 1: at Harvard, he and his colleagues took up a project
Speaker 1: inspired almost entirely by Yamanaka's work, But there was one
Speaker 1: major drawback to Yamanaka's method. To get cells to regress
Speaker 1: to their embryonic like state, you had to use a
Speaker 1: retrovirus that's a virus that inserts its RNA into your cells,
Speaker 1: like coronavirus. To make the regress happen, Yamanaka added four
Speaker 1: genes into a cell. They came to be known as
Speaker 1: the four Yamanaka factors. But adding those genes means you
Speaker 1: risked creating cancerous cells that would obviously not fly for
Speaker 1: human patients. As we mentioned last episode, the saying amongst
Speaker 1: scientists is that DNA makes RNA, makes protein, makes life.
Speaker 1: I call it the trifect of life. DNA makes mRNA,
Speaker 1: makes protein, makes life. What Yamanaka was doing was inserting
Speaker 1: strands of DNA into cells in order to change them.
Speaker 1: But in between inserting the DNA and the cell's changing,
Speaker 1: there's a fundamental intermediary step. The cell has to interpret
Speaker 1: what the DNA is saying, and it does this by
Speaker 1: turning DNA into messenger RNA or mRNA, so that messenger
Speaker 1: rna is basically a readable copy of the DNA. It's
Speaker 1: the mRNA that instructs the cell to revert to its
Speaker 1: immature state. But remember, inserting DNA was too dangerous, so
Speaker 1: Derek's big change to Yamanaka's process was to just skip
Speaker 1: that step. Post hocrofello. In my lab, doctor Luigi Warren
Speaker 1: had the idea, very simple idea, just saying, hey, you
Speaker 1: know we need to make these transcription factors. Let's just
Speaker 1: skip the whole DNA part. Let's just use mRNA bypass
Speaker 1: the DNA and get the mRNA into the cell. I'm
Speaker 1: going to get a bit technical here, but I think
Speaker 1: it'll be worth it. Most DNA, which stores our genetic information,
Speaker 1: lives in the nucleus of cells. When DNA converts into
Speaker 1: messenger RNA, that also happens in the nucleus, but then
Speaker 1: it migrates to the cytoplasm. That's a thick fluid that
Speaker 1: fills the cell. It's where proteins are made. When Derek
Speaker 1: and his team wanted to send instructions to cells, they
Speaker 1: needed to get mRNA straight into the cytoplasm of the
Speaker 1: cells they were using in the lab. The problem, though,
Speaker 1: arose when we introduced the RNA into cells in the dish.
Speaker 1: What we were doing now was bringing it from outside
Speaker 1: the cell to the inside of the cell. And the
Speaker 1: challenge that we face though, was that the cells didn't
Speaker 1: like that at all. When Derek tried to put mRNA
Speaker 1: messenger ribonucleic acid right into some cells, the cells thought
Speaker 1: they are being attacked. To the cell, it looks like
Speaker 1: an invading virus, quite frankly, which caused the cell to
Speaker 1: respond by saying, Oh, looks like a virus is coming in.
Speaker 1: Let's kill our celves, you know, an altruistic suicide and
Speaker 1: cell death, which is a good thing for the cell
Speaker 1: to do, you know, rather than let it be hijacked
Speaker 1: by a virus and have it made hundreds of thousands
Speaker 1: of viral protocols. Again, Derek and his team weren't putting
Speaker 1: viruses into cells, just some snippets of RNA, but the
Speaker 1: cells thought it was a virus, so they needed to
Speaker 1: work around a better way to get RNA into cells.
Speaker 1: It turned out that a workaround already existed and have
Speaker 1: been sitting around waiting for someone to use it. Catalan Corrico,
Speaker 1: Hungarian immigrant and daughter of a butcher, was a floundering
Speaker 1: scientist obsessed with RNA. She'd been working with RNA since
Speaker 1: the nineteen eighties, floating from lab to lab, unable to
Speaker 1: get one of her own. Instead, she had to work
Speaker 1: under other seemingly more successful scientists. Many times now they
Speaker 1: describe my life story, it sounds like, you know, struggle
Speaker 1: and very difficult. Doctor Kurka was on break with her
Speaker 1: new grandchild when we reached out. But here she is
Speaker 1: in an online Q and A. But let me say
Speaker 1: in advance, even if you know things didn't work out
Speaker 1: how I expected, I was always happy, happy in the lab.
Speaker 1: RNA was not exactly a hot topic during much of
Speaker 1: her early career. It was unstable and very difficult to
Speaker 1: work with, as Derek Rossi discovered, but Karko was obsessed
Speaker 1: with it and believed RNA could be used to instruct
Speaker 1: the body to make its own medicines. One day after
Speaker 1: losing it another lab position, she met Drew Wiseman, a
Speaker 1: researcher looking to make a vaccine for HIV at the
Speaker 1: University of Pennsylvania. Kariko told Wiseman that she could make
Speaker 1: anything with m RNA. They teamed up, but they ran
Speaker 1: into the same issues that Derek Rossi would later when
Speaker 1: Corico and Weissmann injected mRNA into mice, their cells saw
Speaker 1: invaders and their immune systems attacked it. But they knew
Speaker 1: that cells didn't treat all RNA as invaders. They had
Speaker 1: to figure out why. It turns out that a component
Speaker 1: of some types of RNA, a molecule called pseudouridine, can
Speaker 1: help evade an immune system reaction. In other words, if
Speaker 1: they added pseudouridine to the mr anda they were trying
Speaker 1: to get into mouse cells, the cells would stop thinking
Speaker 1: of it as an invader. Pseudouridine acted as a cloak.
Speaker 1: And so we published the paper into CELS and five
Speaker 1: and the drew said that, no, no, we can prepare.
Speaker 1: People are inviting us everywhere. Oh waited. I mean we
Speaker 1: did a lot of experts not sitting and waiting. But
Speaker 1: you know, a couple of years best nobody cared, but
Speaker 1: Derek Rossi cared. He read about Carrico and Weisman's cloaking
Speaker 1: method and integrated it into his own work. And so
Speaker 1: when we read that study, we thought, well, maybe we
Speaker 1: could use these modified nucleosides to get mr ANDA into cells,
Speaker 1: to get past these ancient sort of sensing mechanism rather
Speaker 1: than killing the cells, because quite frankly, prior to doing that,
Speaker 1: we killed a lot of cells in the dish as
Speaker 1: a way of seeing if their MR and A modifications
Speaker 1: worked in mice cells. Derek and Luigi Warren, his post doc,
Speaker 1: would test it to create green fluorescent protein, literally coming
Speaker 1: from jellyfish. Green fluorescent protein is sort of a standard
Speaker 1: way of seeing if a protein creating method works in
Speaker 1: a lab. If you shine some uvy light on them,
Speaker 1: they'll glow green under the microscope and you can see
Speaker 1: if your experiment works. Before they found Carrico and Weisman's
Speaker 1: work on pseudourdine, they only got a little green, But
Speaker 1: once they modified the RNA to include pseudouridine, things changed.
Speaker 1: We could now get a lot of green cells in
Speaker 1: the dish and very happily surviving and not dying anymore.
Speaker 1: That was the technological breakthrough that led to the development
Speaker 1: of modified RNA in the lab. They called it mod RNA.
Speaker 1: So now Derek had a working method for putting the
Speaker 1: four Yama naka factors into human skin cells and turning
Speaker 1: them into immature embryonic like cells. Those cells could then
Speaker 1: theoretically be turned into whatever types of cells they wanted.
Speaker 1: For his work modifying RNA, Derek was named one of
Speaker 1: the hundred most influential people in the World by Time
Speaker 1: magazine in twenty eleven. The potential to do great things
Speaker 1: was there, but first he wanted to turn his modified
Speaker 1: RNA methods into a business, so he got a meeting
Speaker 1: with one of the biggest serial entrepreneurs of our time.
Speaker 1: An article in Harvard Business Review calls Bob Langer the
Speaker 1: Edison of medicine. He's taught at MIT for decades and
Speaker 1: as head of the eponymous Langer Lab, which churns out
Speaker 1: new biotechnologies like a revd up vending machine. You know,
Speaker 1: it's very interdisciplinary, and the kinds of problems we try
Speaker 1: to do is it's still i would say, very basic
Speaker 1: science and engineering, but basically to try to make discoveries
Speaker 1: or create technologies that we feel can have a big
Speaker 1: impact on the world. That's a little bit about the lab.
Speaker 1: Bob has more than fourteen hundred pending or granted patents
Speaker 1: and is the most cited engineer in history. His lab
Speaker 1: has had a thousand or so students come through it
Speaker 1: over the years, and together with Bob, the lab has
Speaker 1: produced more than forty companies worth many billions of dollars.
Speaker 1: That's been wonderful. I mean, I think those companies can
Speaker 1: take some of the discoveries we make in academia and
Speaker 1: get them out to the world. And there's nothing I
Speaker 1: think more satisfying to the students who've worked these projects
Speaker 1: and to see that happen and me too. In other words,
Speaker 1: Bob is a super producer or a super supporter of
Speaker 1: both technologies and businesses, mostly to do with medicines and
Speaker 1: tissue engineering, but he's also worked in the hosts of
Speaker 1: other fields, like a couple of years ago he helped
Speaker 1: develop a technique for giving people invisible tattoos that contain
Speaker 1: their medical history. And then there's that time he started
Speaker 1: a company with Jennifer Aniston. We actually even got into
Speaker 1: cosmetics once. We started a company with Jennifer Aniston, and
Speaker 1: that's so called Living Proof, and so it's, you know,
Speaker 1: to help people have less fisty hair and better hair
Speaker 1: and stuff like that. It started when one of Bob's
Speaker 1: former students came to see him one day and was like,
Speaker 1: let's do some stuff with hair. So we took a
Speaker 1: more fundamental look about why what causes FRIZ and basically
Speaker 1: came up with some materials that are much more hydrophobic,
Speaker 1: you know what, are repellent than what anybody ever did
Speaker 1: before their solution scanning for approved compounds that were hydrophobic
Speaker 1: and approved for human use, and found ones that were,
Speaker 1: you know, super super hydrophobic, almost like as hydrophobic as
Speaker 1: a teflon frying pan. And we tried it and it
Speaker 1: worked really well. We got patents for it, and it
Speaker 1: became very popular. It's actually used all over the world.
Speaker 1: They also came up with a product to give hair
Speaker 1: more body, and then they just needed a famous backer.
Speaker 1: Some of the business people and the company, I guess
Speaker 1: talked to some of Jennifer Anderson's agents, and he got
Speaker 1: very excited about it. She actually came to my office
Speaker 1: several times and actually asked really good questions. In twenty ten,
Speaker 1: Bob Langer started yet another company. Derek Rossi, who was
Speaker 1: a young professor at Harvard and came to see me
Speaker 1: because he'd made a discovery that he could put certain
Speaker 1: types of modified Messenger RNA in cells and make them
Speaker 1: more like a stem cell. Here's Derek I was showing
Speaker 1: the science to a colleague Kim Springer, who had experience
Speaker 1: in biotech. He put me in touch with Bob Langer Earthly.
Speaker 1: He said, oh, let's go get Bob's opinion on this.
Speaker 1: So he emailed Bob, and then Tim and I traveled
Speaker 1: over to Bob's office. Bob and Derek met, and Derek
Speaker 1: explained the science, and Bob's reaction was, this is terrific.
Speaker 1: What can I do to help? I just thought, what
Speaker 1: can Bob do to help? And then I thought, well,
Speaker 1: why don't I ask him to co found this company
Speaker 1: with me? Because you know he's a delivery expert. When
Speaker 1: Derek calls Bob Langer a delivery expert, he doesn't mean
Speaker 1: he works for ups. Since the mid nineteen seventies, Bob
Speaker 1: has been a pioneer in several methods of drug delivery.
Speaker 1: Drug delivery means getting a medicine to its intended target
Speaker 1: in the body, whether it's a certain part of the
Speaker 1: brain or the liver, or to attack cancrous cells in
Speaker 1: the skin. Drug delivery can also mean delivering the drug
Speaker 1: consistently for time. That's called controlled release drug delivery. Bob
Speaker 1: is sort of the founder of controlled delivery, a technology
Speaker 1: that allows the large molecules of a drug to disperse
Speaker 1: slowly into the body. Drug delivery can also mean protecting
Speaker 1: the actual substance of a drug so that it can
Speaker 1: get to its target in the body without degrading or
Speaker 1: falling completely apart. Bob has used most of these delivery
Speaker 1: methods in his work, and here's some of the super
Speaker 1: cool technologies. He's helped develop. An implanted wafer that can
Speaker 1: deliver chemotherapy directly to a brain tumor, contact lenses that
Speaker 1: can deliver drugs through the eyes, controlled release systems that
Speaker 1: use magnetism to increase the release of drugs in your body.
Speaker 1: A huge part of Bob's work in drug delivery has
Speaker 1: been with LNPs lipid nanoparticles. They're fatty spheres that carry
Speaker 1: drugs into the body and that work really well carrying
Speaker 1: DNA or RNA. Researchers, not just Bob, have been looking
Speaker 1: at LMP's for drug delivery for decades. They play an
Speaker 1: indispensable role in the mr anda COVID nineteen vaccines, allowing
Speaker 1: the RNA to deliver its spike building instructions into our cells.
Speaker 1: And to learn a bit more about them, I spoke
Speaker 1: with another expert on LMPs. The much larger challenge was
Speaker 1: to identify carriers systems that could deliver biological molecules inside cells,
Speaker 1: and being able to do that efficiently has taken decades
Speaker 1: to accomplish. That's doctor Thomas Madden. Thomas is a biochemist
Speaker 1: and he's worked in the biotechnology field for like thirty years.
Speaker 1: He's president and CEO of Acutous Therapeutics in Vancouver. Acutus
Speaker 1: provides the lipid nanoparticle technology used in the mRNA based
Speaker 1: Fiser vaccine. The vaccine itself was actually developed by a
Speaker 1: German company called Bioentech. Thomas was introduced to Biointech by
Speaker 1: Catlin Corrico. I asked Thomas to break down what a
Speaker 1: lipid nanoparticle is. The nano refers to the fact that
Speaker 1: the size range of these particles is in the nanomesa range,
Speaker 1: So typically these particles are less than one hundred nanometers
Speaker 1: and so that's why we were referred to it as nanoparticles.
Speaker 1: A nanometer is a billionth of a meter. Lipids are
Speaker 1: organic compounds that are insoluble in water but soluble in
Speaker 1: other solutions. A lot of natural oils like olive oil
Speaker 1: and canola oil and waxes like carnabo wax or bees wax.
Speaker 1: Those are all lipids. They're tiny lipid spheres, you know,
Speaker 1: they're less than a thousandth of the width of a hair,
Speaker 1: and they have four different composed us that are all
Speaker 1: required in order for them to work effectively. So they
Speaker 1: have two lipids that are actually naturally occurring lipids. One
Speaker 1: is cholesterol and another is caught diasterol phosphatyl choline. It's
Speaker 1: a lipid that's found in our membranes, are biological membranes naturally.
Speaker 1: LMPs also of two proprietary lipids, basically the secret formula
Speaker 1: lipids that each maker of lipid natal particles uses lipids
Speaker 1: that allow it to have the functionality that it needs.
Speaker 1: Thomas couldn't talk specifics about this, but he did describe
Speaker 1: these ingredients of LMPs in broader terms. The most important
Speaker 1: one of these is caught an ionizable lipid, and it's
Speaker 1: the lipid that really determines how effectively it looks like
Speaker 1: a protein, how effectively it's taken up into cells, and
Speaker 1: also how effectively it can allow the payload the drug
Speaker 1: to be released into the interior of the cell. The
Speaker 1: fourth component is called a peg lipid, and it's really
Speaker 1: it coats the outside of the particle and it's intended
Speaker 1: primarily to stabilize the particle when it's formed, and when
Speaker 1: the drug is loaded inside, and during storage of the
Speaker 1: vaccine or the therapeutic. So what he's saying is you
Speaker 1: need to protect the mr anda from falling apart before
Speaker 1: it reaches the cell. That's one job of lnp's The
Speaker 1: second job is getting the mRNA into our cells. The
Speaker 1: LNPs needs to be recognized by human cells, or else
Speaker 1: the cells will just ignore them and not get any
Speaker 1: instructions from the mr anda encapsulated within them. The way
Speaker 1: they do this is to make the LMP spheares resemble
Speaker 1: something called lipoproteins, which cells recognize and use to get
Speaker 1: nutrients they need. So Acutus makes the surface of an
Speaker 1: LMP look like the surface of a natural lipoprotein. And
Speaker 1: when it has that surface characteristic, then there's just a
Speaker 1: particular protein in the blood called apoe which will bind
Speaker 1: to it, and that apoe is then recognized by cells.
Speaker 1: There are receptors for it on the external surface of
Speaker 1: the cells, so it'll bind to the cells and basically
Speaker 1: tell the cells, you know, take me up. I've got
Speaker 1: a a parcel containing lipids for you that you need
Speaker 1: for metabolism. So we take advantage of that natural uptake
Speaker 1: mechanism in order to you know, get these particles into
Speaker 1: a cell. In case all of that was a little
Speaker 1: too in the weeds, Thomas Madden sums it up with
Speaker 1: a nice metaphor, you know, a really a good analogy
Speaker 1: for for what our technology does. That's like a real
Speaker 1: world example is if if you wanted to order a
Speaker 1: really fragile glass ornament online and you wanted it delivered
Speaker 1: to your to your home. If you use the equivalent
Speaker 1: of our delivery technology, then the ornament would be would
Speaker 1: be wrapped and packaged to protect it, and about how
Speaker 1: rough the journey was to your to your house. The
Speaker 1: package would would find your house, it would open the
Speaker 1: front door by itself and let itself in, and then
Speaker 1: it would unwrap itself. So the ornament is waiting for
Speaker 1: you to come along and pick up in your hallway.
Speaker 1: Lipid nanoparticles the FedEx of vaccines. When Derek Rossi went
Speaker 1: to Bob Langer's office to present his idea for a
Speaker 1: company that uses modified RNA to create new drugs. He
Speaker 1: knew that Bob was a pioneer in delivering drugs into
Speaker 1: the body. The Languor Lab had developed the first nanoparticles
Speaker 1: that could deliver nucleic acids like RNA and many of
Speaker 1: the principles and components behind the LMPs that are now
Speaker 1: used in the mr anda COVID vaccines. And so in
Speaker 1: the summer of twenty ten, Bob and Derek and another
Speaker 1: scientist they brought in named Kenneth Chen got some funding
Speaker 1: from a venture capital firm then called Flagship Ventures, and
Speaker 1: together they started a company. But it wasn't much of
Speaker 1: a company at first. There were no full time employees,
Speaker 1: There was no office. And how many people worked at
Speaker 1: the company when it was first founded. Was it literally
Speaker 1: just the four of you or was there a whole
Speaker 1: staff at the first No, it was nobody other I mean,
Speaker 1: and we weren't none of us were full time. I
Speaker 1: mean basically we would meet in Flagship's offices or my
Speaker 1: office and you know, and just brainstorm, and you know,
Speaker 1: that was probably the first six months. And back to Derek,
Speaker 1: I kept my day job in academia, so I was
Speaker 1: always you know, had my professorship at the med school.
Speaker 1: Eventually the company did have a name. Maderna comes from
Speaker 1: the term that we used in the lab describing the technology.
Speaker 1: We called it mod RNA, So mod RNA, if you
Speaker 1: put any in there, you get Maderna. That's where the
Speaker 1: name came from. So in twenty ten they founded a
Speaker 1: company called Maderna. Bob Langer has been on the Scientific
Speaker 1: Advisory Board and on the board of directors ever since.
Speaker 1: Derek Rossi was on the Scientific Advisory Board and on
Speaker 1: the board of directors until twenty fourteen. By then, Maderna
Speaker 1: had a new CEO and a president and was moving
Speaker 1: towards bringing therapeutics to clinical trials with entire staff of hundreds.
Speaker 1: Of course, Derek never predicted that Maderna, the company he
Speaker 1: founded and then left, would go on to be one
Speaker 1: of the first to create a vaccine against a global pandemic.
Speaker 1: Derek has started a few more companies since then. Even
Speaker 1: though he didn't play direct role in Maderna's blockbuster product,
Speaker 1: he now spends a lot of his time talking about
Speaker 1: the power of the COVID vaccines. I always believed in
Speaker 1: the technology. I always believed that there would be modified mRNA.
Speaker 1: I drank the kool aid a long time ago. I
Speaker 1: always believe that it was going to be a new
Speaker 1: class of medicines, and they're upon us, so that's pretty satisfying.
Speaker 1: I spend most of my time these days, or since
Speaker 1: the pandemics started talking about what mRNA is introducing mRNA
Speaker 1: to the planet lately, talking a lot about what vaccines
Speaker 1: are and trying to tackle this issue of vaccine hesitancy
Speaker 1: because people are hesitant abou vaccines because they don't know
Speaker 1: what the heck they are. So the whole idea with
Speaker 1: vaccination is to prime your immune system so that it's
Speaker 1: ready to spring into action should you get exposed to
Speaker 1: a pathogen. It's something your immune system does on a
Speaker 1: daily basis. It's doing it right now. It's also one
Speaker 1: of the most tried and trude medicines that we've ever
Speaker 1: had in the history of humanity. And the reason it's
Speaker 1: so darned good is because you're really just asking the
Speaker 1: immune system to do what it does on a regular basis.
Speaker 1: That is, bottom line, what a vaccination is. Derek got
Speaker 1: vaccinated before we spoke back in April this year. Moderna's
Speaker 1: COVID nineteen vaccine has been approved for use in more
Speaker 1: than fifty countries and has sold more than half a
Speaker 1: billion doses of its vaccine. I figured it must have
Speaker 1: been satisfying for Derrek to have finally gotten his jabs.
Speaker 1: I waited my turn like everybody else, and when a
Speaker 1: vaccine was offered to me, I took the one that
Speaker 1: was offered to be which was Fiser. For his discovery
Speaker 1: of induced pluripotent stem cells, Shinya Yamanaka was awarded the
Speaker 1: Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in twenty twelve. During
Speaker 1: his Nobel lecture, he talked about the many roadblocks he
Speaker 1: had throughout his career and the many mentors and colleagues
Speaker 1: who helped him get through them. He also spoke about
Speaker 1: the many scientists whose accomplishments were necessary before he could
Speaker 1: have his own. That included discoveries in nineteen sixty two
Speaker 1: at the University of Ford, in nineteen eighty one at
Speaker 1: the University of Cambridge and the University of California, San Francisco,
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty eight at the University of Wisconsin, and
Speaker 1: in two thousand and one at Kyoto University. Yamanaka knew
Speaker 1: that his earth shattering discovery was built upon the backs
Speaker 1: of many others, like how Derek Rossi's was built upon
Speaker 1: Catlin Corrico's and Drew Weisman's and their work upon many others,
Speaker 1: And like how the COVID nineteen vaccines are built upon
Speaker 1: centuries of work in and outside of laboratories across many borders,
Speaker 1: which is the whole point of this podcast. Next Monday,
Speaker 1: December tenth, I'm going to see done Bell Prize one
Speaker 1: behalful many scientists who have contributed to the generation of
Speaker 1: IPS cells and who have contribute duty to the very
Speaker 1: rapid progress of this technology. So I really hope that
Speaker 1: end bury near future these technologies well help passions. On
Speaker 1: the next episode of long Shot, we're going to talk
Speaker 1: to some coronavirus patients who have never recovered. They suffer
Speaker 1: vivid dreams, insomnia, and a host of other weird symptoms
Speaker 1: that are nothing like the respiratory illness we think of
Speaker 1: as COVID nineteen. They have long COVID and they've had
Speaker 1: it since the beginning of the pandemic. Long Shot is
Speaker 1: a production of School of Humans and iHeartRadio. Today's episode
Speaker 1: of long Shot was produced, written, and narrated by me
Speaker 1: Sean Revive. A co producer is Gabby Watts. Special thanks
Speaker 1: to Noel Brown and iHeartRadio. Today's episode was fact checked
Speaker 1: by Savannah Hugally. Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr,
Speaker 1: and ELC. Crowley. Long Shot was scored by Jason Shannon.
Speaker 1: The score was mixed by Vic Stafford. Sound Design and
Speaker 1: audio mixed was by Harper Harris with Tunewelders School of
Speaker 1: Humans