Hosting a conversation on medicine
On December 2, 2024, Dr. Omar Costilla Reyes hosted Moderna chief executive Stéphane Bancel at MIT for “Shaping the Future of Medicine: A Conversation with Moderna’s CEO, Stéphane Bancel,” held at MIT Sloan. The title slide carries the logos of Moderna, the MIT Management Healthcare Club and the MIT Sloan School of Management. Bancel was joined in conversation by Andrew Lo, the MIT Sloan professor of finance who directs the Laboratory for Financial Engineering and applies quantitative methods to questions in finance and biotechnology. In his post that day, Dr. Costilla Reyes described it as a conversation on the future of medicine and himself as the host, and the photographs show the event slide and two speakers seated on stage in the lecture hall.
Why Moderna’s story matters for medicine
In a post before the event, Dr. Costilla Reyes noted that Bancel and his team had helped the world emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic by developing an mRNA vaccine produced at scale. Messenger RNA (mRNA) is a molecule that carries instructions for making a protein; an mRNA vaccine delivers instructions for a harmless piece of a virus so that the body can learn to recognize it, and the same platform can be reprogrammed by changing the sequence, an idea also discussed on his page about the programmable-medicine talks at EmTech in 2022.
From discovery to treatment
A therapy reaches patients only when scientific insight, clinical need and the resources to develop it come together. Bancel’s company stands on the development side of that path, and Lo’s research on quantitative methods in finance and biotechnology on the financial side.