오늘 회사 한국인 동료분과 이야기하다가 “퇴사한 이형”을 들어보라는 조언을 들어서 한번 들어봤는데요 저에게 정말 도움이 되는 조언을 주시는군요. 이 분은 본래 이랜드 인사부문에서 일을 하셨고 현재 커리어 마스터라는 유튜버로 일을 하시네요. 아래에 있는 “회사를 선택할 때 체크할 두가지”
성장하는 회사인가? 성장하는 회사이면 내가 성장할 기회가 있지만 반대라면 기회가 적다.
상사가 성장하는 사람인가? 상사가 성장하는 사람이고 배울 것이 있다면 나도 성장할 가능성이 높다.
Moderna 의 현재까지의 Story를 엮고 있는데요. 많은 우여곡절이 있었고 그 노력과 애환의 결과 지금까지 왔습니다. 이에 대한 몇가지 Media의 기사들을 옮기려고 합니다.
2016년에 STAT에서는 Moderna에 대한 매우 신랄한 비판 기사를 씁니다. 아직도 STAT은 그리 우호적인 기사를 쓰지 않습니다. 아래는 2016년 9월에 나온 STAT의 기사입니다. 주로 Stephane Bancel 대표의 경영 스타일에 집중적으로 기사를 썼습니다.
직장인으로 살다보니 하루 중 대부분은 회사 내에서 보내게 됩니다. 처음에는 10층에 혼자 덩그러니 떨어져서 조용히 이것저것 생각할 수 있는 여유도 있고 마냥 자유롭게 일을 조절할 수 있는 자유를 누리고 있었는데 그러다 보니 점점
“너무 혼자 스스로 소외되는 것 아닌가?”
하는 생각이 들었습니다. 코로나 팬데믹 동안에 재택근무 (Work from Home)을 하면서 사람을 만나야되는 소중함을 알게 되었습니다. 사실 사람과 사람은 서로 눈인사만 하고 그냥 사소한 인사만 한두마디 해도 그것 만으로도 하지 않는 것보다 더 중요하다는 사실을 알게 된 것이 코로나가 가져다 준 “레슨”이 아닌가 하고 생각을 해 봅니다.
나름 열심히 달려왔는데 잠시 여유가 생긴 듯해서 주위를 돌아보니 아무도 없더라구요. 참 이런 게 인생인가?
하는 그런 마음이 들어서 당황하기도 하고 내심 뭔가 잘못되어도 한참 잘못된 것이 아닌가 하고 생각하게 되었어요. 저에게 보고하는 직원이 3명인데 그동안은 메신저로 얘기를 하다가 요즘은 일부러 실험실에 찾아가서 시간을 두고 얘기를 하다가 옵니다. 적어도 두번 정도씩은 가야겠다고 생각했어요.
생각보다 직원들이 저를 만나고 싶어한다는 사실을 알게 되었습니다. 물론 뭔가 보여주어야 한다는 부담감도 보이기는 하지만 그보다는 저와 대화를 해야 좀더 마음이 안정이 되는 듯한 느낌을 받았습니다.
그래서 가능하면 가서 서로 인사도 나누고 얘기를 주고 받으려고 하게 되었습니다. 저에게도 좋고 그 친구들에게도 좋겠지요. 요즘은 상사라는 생각보다는 코칭을 한다는 생각으로 다가갑니다. 저도 워낙 부족한 것이 많다보니 코칭도 쉽지는 않지만 그래도 대화를 풀어나가다 보면 무엇을 얘기하는게 좋을지 감을 잡을 수는 있더라구요.
한국인 동료들도 조금더 챙겨야 하겠다는 생각을 하게 되었습니다. 어떤 동료들은 잘 지내는 것 같기도 하고 또 다른 동료들은 조금 힘든게 보이기도 합니다. 특히 조직이 자꾸 개편을 하니까 그런 부분들에서 혼란이 있는 것 같고 그럴때는 저와 대화를 하는게 혹시 조금은 마음이 풀리는 것 같기도 합니다.
제가 직장생활을 시작한지 몇년 안된 동료들에게 회사에 오래 버티고 남아있으라고 조언을 한 적이 있었는데, 오늘 그러더라구요. 그게 쉽지 않을 것 같다고요.
회사에서 하는 일이 너무 같아서 발전을 느끼지 못하는 것도 있을 수 있고 승진을 하지 못하면 받게되는 스트레스 때문이라든가 회사에서 갑자기 나가야 하는 상황이 생길 수도 있으니까요.
하지만 가만히 얘기를 들어보면 요즘 회사 주가가 너무 빠져서 스톡옵션 행사를 못하게 된 동료들이 더 이런 아노미에 빠지는 것이 아닌가 하는 생각도 듭니다.
요즘 우리 회사는 글로벌 회사로 발돋움하기 위해 무지막지하게 투자를 하고 있습니다. 올해에만 투자하는 R&D 비용이 $4.5 Billion이고 공장이나 지사 신설도 계속되고 있으니까요.
상황이 이렇다보니 아마 좀 마음이 급해질 수도 있는 것 같습니다. 특히 기초연구에 있는 동료들이 많이 힘들어하는 듯 합니다. 제가 그동안은 말수를 줄이고 들으려고 노력을 많이 했습니다. 나대지 않으려고요.
그런데 그냥 말을 하지 않는 것보다는 어쩌면 조금이라도 상황을 객관적으로 인식할 수 있도록 조언을 아끼지 않아야 할 것 같은 마음도 드네요.
저는 몇년 있으면 굳이 회사를 다니지 않아도 되는 상황이지만 이제 막 직장생활을 시작한 동료들로서는 갈 길이 멀고 또 그런 막막함이 불안감으로 다가올 수도 있는 것 같습니다.
저도 한때 저를 엄청나게 갈아넣은 시기가 있었는데 막상 동료들이 그런 시간을 보내고 있는 것을 보고 있자니 마음이 좀 짠~ 합니다.
어제부터 Venture Capital 회사 Homepages에 나온 회사들을 만든 이유와 Start-Up Build-Up Story를 공부하면서 적고 있습니다. 제가 최근에 아주 관심있게 보고 있는 회사인 “Tessera Therapeutics”에 대해서 애기를 좀 해 보려고 합니다. 저의 동료 중에서 똑똑한 직원들이 이 회사로 몇명 이직을 했습니다. 그리고 회사가 많이 커지고 있어서 저는 이 회사의 기술이 어떤 것인지 주의깊게 지켜보고 있는 중입니다.
질문은 두가지입니다.
What If? 만일 자연계의 생명체가 유전자를 자르는 대신 수정할 수 있는 방향으로 진화된다면?
It Turns Out – DNA를 분해하는 CRISPR와 달리 자연계에는 DNA를 새롭게 쓰는 기작이 더 많이 존재한다. 천연 MGE (mobile genetic element)를 가공하거나 새로운 합성 MGE를 만듦으로써 유전자 치료제나 유전자 편집 기술의 단점을 개선하고 유전질환을 치료할 수 있는 “Gene Writer” 유전자 의약품을 혁신적으로 개발할 수 있다.
Our genome is a mosaic that has evolved over millennia. It is composed of base pairs, the nucleobases A, C, T, and G—the building blocks of DNA. These represent the code of life and give rise to the complex phenomena that define health and disease. Specific sequences of base pairs encode genes, which serve every function in our bodies. Development, homeostasis, and reproduction; aging, disease, and death—all are driven by the activity of genes.
Doctors know of about 4,000 genes that directly cause diseases. These include the cystic fibrosis transmembrane receptor, which when mutated causes cystic fibrosis, which can severely damage the lungs and other organs to the point of being life-threatening. About 60,000 other genetic sites are significantly associated with traits and diseases such as body mass, cardiovascular disease, neurological conditions, metabolic diseases, immune responses, and many cancers. Every year the number of human genomes that have been sequenced increases, as does our understanding of how genes provide the instructions to make us healthy or unhealthy human beings.
Recently, scientists and doctors have gained the power to add and subtract tiles from our genomic mosaic. This has opened the possibility of creating therapies that not only treat previously untreatable disease but might also cure patients for life with a single treatment. Today, this area, sometimes called genetic medicine, stands upon two technological pillars: gene therapy and gene editing. Both technologies are enormously promising, and in some cases they have already realized their promise and cured diseases. But gene therapy and gene editing have significant limitations in the modifications they can make to the genome, the cells they can affect, and how they are manufactured and delivered to cells, leaving today’s genetic medicine powerless against thousands of diseases.
Origins
In 2017, Flagship partner Geoffrey von Malzahn, principal Jacob Rubens, associate Rob Citorik, and others began an exploration inside Flagship Labs to address these limitations by asking, What if nature evolved a better way to alter genomes than cutting DNA? The result is Tessera Therapeutics. The company is pioneering a new category of genome engineering technology called Gene Writing and establishing a new field of genetic medicine. Gene Writing writes curative therapeutic messages into the genome. It can specifically and efficiently direct diverse alterations to the genome, in any type of cell, creating new possibilities for patients with genetic diseases.
Gene therapy, the more advanced of the two pillars of contemporary genetic medicine, uses engineered viruses to add DNA to cells in order to treat diseases caused by recessive mutations. Such mutations typically prevent the gene from functioning as it should.
Gene therapy can be divided into ex vivo and in vivo approaches. Retroviral vectors, like the lentiviral vectors derived from HIV, integrate DNA semi-randomly into the genome. They have been the workhorses for ex vivo gene therapy, including the use of engineered immune cells to treat cancer, known as CAR-T cell therapies. Building upon work from Luigi Naldini and others at the San Rafaele Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy, in Milan, GlaxoSmithKline used retroviral vectors to develop Strimvelis, the world’s first ex vivo curative gene therapy (later spun out into Orchard Therapeutics). It has been approved by the European Medical Association to treat a mutation that causes an immune disorder known as bubble boy disease.
For in vivo applications of gene therapy, adeno-associated viruses (AAVs) have emerged as the primary means of delivering DNA into cells. An AAV is a viral vector that delivers episomal DNA (DNA maintained separately from the rest of our genome) to cells. The first gene therapy to be approved in the United States was an AAV therapy developed by Spark Therapeutics (later acquired by Roche) that delivers a gene into the eye to treat a mutation causing impaired vision. More recently, Avexis (acquired by Novartis) developed an AAV gene therapy called Zolgensma, which has enabled children born with spinal muscular atrophy to survive what had been a lethal disease. More than 175 AAV gene therapies are in clinical development at pharma companies such as Pfizer and Roche, large biotechs like Sarepta and Uniqure, and startups like 4D Molecular Therapeutics and Homology Medicine. However, AAV gene therapy is unable to deliver long stretches of DNA and therefore cannot deliver all genes; and it can’t treat diseases that affect dividing cells, because the AAV’s episomal DNA is left behind when the cells replicate. What’s more, because the human immune system attacks and develops resistance to viruses, a gene therapy can only be administered once to any patient, so doctors are unable to adjust the treatment or readminister it if its effect fades.
Gene editing, the second pillar of existing genetic medicine, uses nucleases to cut the genome at a specific location and relies upon cellular DNA damage-response pathways to fix the genetic lesion. The gene editing technology CRISPR, developed by Jennifer Doudna at the University of California, Berkeley; Feng Zhang at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; and others, is being further developed by companies including Editas, CRISPR, and Intellia. CRISPR is remarkably programmable and efficient, but it is only the latest nuclease technology, following upon zinc-finger nucleases, developed by Sangamo; TALENs, developed by Cellectis; meganucleases, developed by Precision Biosciences; and megaTALs, developed by Pregenen and now Bluebird.
These technologies have different features and bugs, but the one manipulation they all do well is cut the genome. That is what the versions that exist in nature evolved to do. CRISPR technology, for instance, is based on a natural defense system that bacteria use to destroy the DNA of invading viruses. By cutting the genome, gene editing can stimulate the process of integrating new DNA into the genome. But this process is inefficient in most cells, because it relies upon DNA damage-response pathways, which are unreliably expressed by the cell and typically repress large genetic alterations.
As a consequence, most gene editing drugs in development are intended to treat diseases that can be addressed by breaking genes without introducing new DNA. These diseases are typically caused by dominant negative mutations, such as the CEP290 mutation that causes Leber congenital amaurosis 10, for which it is better to break the mutated gene than to let it function. Notable exceptions are CAR-T cell therapies and cell therapies for sickle cell disease. The gene editing drugs in development target just 30 nucleotides out of the more than 3 billion nucleotides in our genome. (That’s 0.000001% of the genome!)
With more than 500 ongoing clinical trials, gene therapy and gene editing promise an era in which some of humanity’s most devastating genetic diseases will be cured. But gene therapy cannot complement recessive mutations in long genes or in dividing cells. And gene editing cannot fix dominant mutations in genes whose proper functioning is necessary for health. Further, the viral vectors necessary in gene therapy are inefficient to make, which amounts to a significant impediment to realizing the potential of these technologies.
Breakthrough
Tessera discovered a solution to these problems by harnessing evolution’s greatest genomic architect: mobile genetic elements. Canonically, evolution alters the prevalence of genomes in a population. However, we now recognize that evolution may also act at the level of genes. This theory was popularized by Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press, 1976), which argued that our genomes are not only unitary evolutionary entities but are also like villages, composed of thousands of inhabitants called genes, each vying for its own survival. An important piece of evidence for this theory is that some genes evolved the ability to replicate independently of the rest of the genome. These genes are known as mobile genetic elements.
Mobile genetic elements (MGEs) code for the machinery sufficient to move or copy their own DNA into a new location in the genome, and they have been selected over billions of years for their ability to replicate. Barbara McClintock, born in 1902, was a pioneering 20th-century geneticist who unraveled the secrets of genetic recombination and regulation, and she won the 1983 Nobel Prize for her discovery of the first MGE and its mechanism of transposition. She studied the movement of MGEs in corn and demonstrated transposition in a series of classic experiments.
What may have initially seemed like an obscure property of maize’s genome turned out to be a unifying feature of all modern life forms: MGEs are the most abundant genes in the world. There is more DNA in nature that codes for MGEs in natural genomes than there is DNA that does anything else.
MGEs are found across the entire animal kingdom, and they also make up a large percentage of the genomes of archaea, bacteria, and plants. In fact, by most measures MGEs make up about 50% of our own DNA, meaning that 1.5 billion nucleotides of our genome code for mobile elements. To put that in perspective, the protein coding genes that we think of as the workhorses of life make up only 2–3% of our genome.
Advantage
Tessera’s founding team saw the opportunity to pioneer a new category of genome engineering technology based upon the rich molecular biology of MGEs. MGEs replicate through DNA and RNA intermediates. The intermediate can be linear or circular, double- or single-stranded; MGEs can transpose, retrotranspose, and recombine; copy and paste or cut and paste; and integrate specifically into certain DNA sequences, semi-randomly into genomic regions, or randomly into any location in the genome. Perhaps most interestingly, MGEs efficiently alter genomes with minimal reliance upon (indeed, often in spite of) other genes in the cell.
Focus
By harnessing and engineering this biology, Gene Writing can break the rules that have governed genetic medicine for two decades. Tessera has identified tens of thousands of MGEs from across the tree of life that are suitable for Gene Writing. Currently, we are developing both RNA-templated and DNA-templated Gene Writing technologies based on engineered and synthetic MGE. RNA Gene Writers can write into or rewrite the genome based upon an RNA template that coordinates base pair changes, small insertions and deletions, or the integration of entire genes. DNA Gene Writers use a DNA template to write large payloads into the genome. With these technologies, for the first time it may be possible to make diverse alterations to the genome, both small and large, without breaking the genome or relying on DNA repair pathways; to deliver RNA to cells in order to add new DNA into the genome without relying on viruses that cannot be administered more than once; and to scalably and affordably manufacture medicines so that cures can reach all the patients in need.
Tessera believes that Gene Writing will become a new field of genetic medicine by making treatments possible for the genetic defects at the root of thousands of diseases. DNA is the code of life—and thus the code that drives an enormous variety of human diseases. Tessera aims to cure rare genetic diseases that gene therapy and gene editing cannot address and to revolutionize medicine by transforming the standard of care for many diseases from treatments to cures. Like artists changing individual tiles—known as tessera—of a mosaic to alter the whole, Gene Writing scientists will change the fundamental unit of biology: genes.
오늘은 오랜만에 한국인 직원 몇분과 점심식사를 함께 했습니다. 직장 생활 시작한지 몇년 지난 분들이어서 가장 큰 관심사가 승진 (Promotion)에 대한 얘기였습니다. 사실 저도 처음 직장 생활할 당시에는 승진에 대해 굉장히 중요하게 생각했던 것 같습니다. 물론 지금도 승진을 하면 좋지만 과거에 비해서는 그 중요도가 그리 크지 않고 저의 경우에는 급여 인상 (Pay Raise)이 승진과 못지않게 오르고 있으면 그리 문제삼지 않습니다.
회사 마다 다르지만 회사가 스타트업인 경우에는 승진이 보다 더 쉬울 수 있지만 회사 규모가 대기업으로 되면 승진은 거의 어려워지고 10년 이상의 기간 동안에도 승진이 되지 않는 경우를 봤습니다. 미국 회사에서 외국인으로 사는 것이 나이와 연차가 쌓이면서 점점 어려움을 느끼게 되죠.
그러다가 한국의 대기업이나 제약회사에서 임원직 제의를 받으면 보통 그 제의를 수락하고 새 삶(?) 을 사는 것 같습니다.
승진을 하면 그 순간은 좋아요. 그런데 그 좋아하는 순간이 그리 오래가지 않습니다. 물론 승진을 못하면 “나가라!” 라는 사인일 수도 있습니다. 그러면 나가서 다른 잡을 찾아야 하겠죠.
저는 새로운 기술 플랫폼을 창조하고 회사를 빌드업하는 것에 관심이 많습니다. 아직 현재 직장을 계속 다닐 예정이지만 다른 회사를 알아볼 일이 생긴다면 아마 가능한 새로운 테크놀러지를 구현하고자 하는 스타트업에서 일하고 싶어질 것 같습니다.
때로는 2년마다 직장을 바꾸는 분들도 보았습니다. 직장을 옮겨가면 직급은 올라가게 됩니다. 그런데 이것도 너무 자주 하게 되면 새로 옮기는 회사에서 볼 때 오랜 기간 있지 않을 거라는 생각으로 좋은 회사로의 이직은 어려울 수 있습니다.
이 논문을 바탕으로 2012년에 SNBL은 Wave Life Sciences Pte Ltd를 설립합니다.
3년간의 Incubation 기간을 통한 Data를 기반으로 Boston 본사와 Okinawa 지사를 둔 회사인 Wave Life Sciences는 2015년 2월에 RA Capital과 일본 Venture Capital인 Kagoshima Shinsangyo Sosei Investment LP와 SNBL로 부터 $18M (216억원)의 Series A를 합니다.
그리고 3개월 후에 IPO를 하여 $102M (1,224억원) Funding을 하였습니다. 당시 주가는 주당 $16입니다.
이렇게 3년간의 SNBL Incubation기간 후에 단 9개월만에 Series A, Series B, IPO까지 마쳤고 총 Funding 금액은 $186M (2,232억원)을 모집했습니다. 이사회에는 SNBL의 임원 한명이 올라가 있고 현재 SNBL은 Wave Life Sciences의 대주주 (21.5%)입니다.
지금도 유사하지만 2012-2015년 일본의 Venture Capital Funding 상황은 좋지 못했습니다. 일본 상장 대신 3년간 Incubation을 잘해서 바로 Boston으로 본사를 변경하고 NASDAQ에 상장하는 방식은 배워볼 만하다고 생각합니다.
Picture a factory for making drugs: there are raw materials, carefully honed protocols, assembly lines where the drugs are put together or vats where they’re grown. There’s a foreman watching over production—specifying what to make, how much, and when. It’s all very complex. It’s also big: pharmaceutical factories can run to 800,000 square feet or more.
Now picture a drug factory the way Noubar Afeyan, the co-founder and chairman of Moderna and founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering, has learned to see it: at about 25 µm in diameter, less than the width of a human hair.
This factory is a cell, and its foreman is messenger RNA (mRNA)—the molecule that ferries DNA’s instructions to the cell’s protein-making machinery. mRNA is poised to transform the pharmaceutical industry. By engineering new forms of the molecule, Moderna is working to create mRNA medicines to instruct a patient’s own cells to produce proteins that could prevent, treat or cure disease—and, says Afeyan, “every single cell in the body gets its instructions from mRNA.”
Origins
For a company with such a profound potential impact, Moderna is still relatively new. It got its start in spring 2010, when Afeyan met with Bob Langer, the prolific inventor and professor of chemical engineering at MIT. Langer wanted to talk to Afeyan about using mRNA to reprogram adult human fibroblast cells into induced pluripotent stem cells, enabling them to transform into other cell types, following the protocol of Shinya Yamanaka.
Afeyan found the project fascinating, but not because of the possibility of reprogramming adult cells. He was more interested in the process: specifically, the idea of using mRNA in previously unimagined ways. Academics had studied mRNA closely for decades, coming to understand its biological roles in fine detail. Many biotechnology and drug companies had modified other complex biological molecules such as plasmids and viral vectors before. But they hadn’t seriously attempted to engineer mRNA for use as a new kind of medicine.
Afeyan, a biochemical engineer by training, wanted to try. “I’d worked a lot on protein manufacturing innovations,” he says, “and a thought occurred to me in that meeting: “Why can’t we use mRNA so that the patient becomes a manufacturing facility for his own drugs?”
At the time, the idea seemed, Afeyan admits, “far afield.” But that made it a perfect candidate for Flagship’s pioneering approach of pursuing ideas beyond the innovations that incumbent companies typically seek.
Focus
Afeyan and Flagship Pioneering Managing Partner Doug Cole launched a months-long exploration inside Flagship Labs, the enterprise’s innovation foundry. At first, the venture was merely a numbered prototype company or “ProtoCo:” LS18. Afeyan and Cole quizzed other life scientists from Harvard and MIT about the idea’s feasibility. What they learned didn’t discourage them. Then, they brought in young researchers from the lab of Nobel laureate Jack Szostak, a pioneer of RNA manipulation, and gave them two big questions to tackle: Could we get patients to make their own protein biologics? And could mRNA be the basis for that?
Soon, the first two questions generated dozens more. When mRNA was put into cells, it caused an immediate immune response—why? (The answer wasn’t clear: the specific biochemical culprit hadn’t been identified.) Other types of RNA had been chemically modified before, to render them more stable in the bloodstream; could mRNA be modified in the same way? (No, it turned out: unlike the other RNAs, mRNA had to survive transcription from DNA and translation into proteins, and the modifications interfered with both processes.) If the previous modifications wouldn’t work, would others? (Maybe—but no one would know without animal experiments.)
The questions continued among the founding team at Flagship. “If you go into an animal with these mRNAs—and there was no animal data—where does the mRNA go? How much does it persist? Could you get enough of it into cells to make protein? Would the protein be correctly folded? If it was the correctly folded protein, would it be made in enough quantity to be therapeutically even remotely useful? And how would you figure it out? The tools didn’t exist.”
Three months in, the team had no easy answers—just hard questions and blue sky. For many entrepreneurs, this might have been the time to back out. But at Flagship, the team could imagine unprecedented answers to all the questions—as well as enormous commercial potential. With so little previous research in existence, practically everything Flagship did would be patentable.
In early 2010, LS18 was renamed Moderna and its scientists moved into a lab on First Street in Cambridge, Mass. They spent the next six months injecting rats with different combinations of modified mRNAs. It was not glamorous work. Nor was it an immediate success: as the team anticipated, most of the mRNA molecules didn’t survive transcription and translation. But a few of them did. Some of the rats’ cells started producing proteins that they wouldn’t have otherwise made, first in tiny amounts, then in larger ones. That was enough to move forward, says Afeyan: “Gradually, gradually, we convinced ourselves.”
On First Street, Moderna began the hard work of building a company. Flagship’s VentureLabs group filed provisional patents in July and October 2010. Stéphane Bancel who had been Chief Executive Officer of the French diagnostics company bioMérieux SA, joined Moderna’s board of directors in March 2011, and became its CEO in October, 2011.
Breakthrough
Today, those early experiments have evolved into a panoply of potential medicines, including a personalized cancer vaccine (with Merck), a suite of investigational medicines designed to provoke the body’s immune system into attacking cancer tumors, a development candidate that could help the body regenerate blood vessels (with AstraZeneca), and a program that seeks to leverage the liver to manufacture enzymes for rare disease patients who were born without the ability to make those enzymes on their own. Best known, of course, are Moderna’s vaccines against infectious diseases, including mRNA-1273, the vaccine against the Novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2), which was granted emergency use authorization in December, 2020. In all, the company now has 21 programs in its pipeline with 11 in clinical development. Moderna’s mRNA platform builds on continuous advances in basic and applied mRNA science, delivery technology, and manufacturing, with the goal of creating a new class of medicines: or as Afeyan describes it “a potential revolution in the making.”
Advantage
To get here, Moderna’s scientists have doggedly pursued answers to the questions that seemed so daunting in the summer of 2010. For instance: the company realized early on that the immune system was identifying mRNA as foreign and hostile, and reacting by shutting down protein production—the very thing these potential drug candidates were supposed to increase. The problem took years to solve, but Moderna has now developed proprietary ways to package mRNA so it can evade the immune system and deliver it to the right cells in the body, and has demonstrated the ability to repeatedly dose therapeutics for rare diseases in animals.
Afeyan freely admits that the mature company has expanded beyond its original vision. Vaccines weren’t a major focus in 2010; they ended up being some of the first things Moderna took into the clinic. Combination therapies weren’t on the radar in 2010 either; today, many of the company’s candidates use combinations of mRNAs to make complex proteins, using multiple encoded mRNAs in a single injection. “We’re learning and learning,” says Afeyan.
Will there be more questions? Of course. But there are also answers—today, for Moderna’s scientists, and someday soon, for patients.
버킷리스트를 쓰기 시작한지 꽤 되어서 그런지 이제 더 이상 해볼만한 버킷리스트가 없다고 생각을 한 차에 한가지 중요한 버킷리스트가 빠졌다는 것을 오늘에야 깨달았습니다. 이것은 제가 커리어 코치로 살고 싶다는 비전과도 연결이 되고 Biotech Enabler로 사는데에 있어서도 중요한 밑거름이 될 것이라고 생각합니다.
제가 자서전 쓰기라고 하지 않고 자서전 출판이라고 한 이유는 저의 자서전이 다른 분들의 삶 특히 현재 생명공학이나 자연과학, 의과학을 공부하는 학생부터 제약 바이오텍에서 각고의 노력을 하시고 계시는 모든 분들께 혹시 희망의 메시지를 전달할 수 있지 않을까 하는 생각이 있어서 입니다.
자서전 출판은 생각보다 다양한 방식으로 할 수 있군요. 3가지 정도 방식으로 출판할 수 있는 것 같습니다.
자비출판: 작가 본인이 스스로 처음부터 모든 걸 하고 100% 수익을 가져가는 방식
기획출판: 출판사가 처음부터 끝까지 모든 비용을 지불하고 수익의 일부만 저자가 가져가는 방식
준기획출판 혹은 반기획출판: 자비출판과 기획출판을 병행한 방법
저의 경우에는 출판이 처음이기 때문에 기획출판이나 준기획출판을 해야 하지 않을까 하고 생각합니다. 출판을 해 본 경험이 있는 지인을 통해서 좀 알아봐야 할 것 같네요.
제가 자서전 출판으로 내고 싶은 것은 저의 삶의 여정이 다른 사람과 달리 다양하고 우여곡절이 많았다는 것이 이유입니다. 제가 처음 제약/바이오 기업에 입사해서 커리어를 쌓을 때에는 바이오 기업에 대한 기대가 크지 않은 때였습니다. 상당한 High Risk High Return 업종이라는 인식이 강했고요 장기투자에 대한 인식도 강했던 것이 사실입니다.
하지만 이제는 그런 일이 많이 달라졌기 때문에 지금 바이오텍에 첫 발을 내딛는 분들께는 “저의 경험 + 새로운 시대의 바이오텍에 대한 트렌드 이해”에 대한 점을 함께 얘기할 수 있는 책이 필요하다고 생각을 했고요 한번 써 보려고 합니다.
한가지 방법은 바이오텍에서 오랜기간 일한 분들 몇분이 (7인 이하)이 함께 자서전을 출판해 보는 것도 좋은 방법이 되지 않을까 하고 생각합니다.
BOSTON DR LIM 