Moderna’s Dr. Stephen Hoge on AI and the Future of Healthcare

Dr. Stephen Hoge, President, Moderna: Melanoma used to be a death sentence. What if we could teach your immune system what your cancer looks like? Instead of just getting you know, angry, if you will, and running around the body saying, are there any cancer cells here? Could we actually train it on what your cancer looks like? 
 
Christine Anderson, Global Head of Corporate Affairs, Blackstone: Hello and welcome to Inside Blackstone. I’m Christine Anderson, Global Head of Corporate Affairs, and here’s today’s lineup. First, it’s A.J. Murphy, Chief Operating Officer of Blackstone Private Equity Strategies, she joins us for the Monday Morning Meeting. Then, it’s Winfield Sickles joining me for the Economic Weather Report and his hot take on the macro. And then the main event, Dr. Stephen Hoge, President of Moderna, on how AI is impacting drug discovery and the future of personalized medicine. And finally, Dr. Nick Galakatos, Head of Blackstone Life Sciences, joins me for the Debrief to unpack it all.  
  
Christine Anderson: A.J., I'm so excited you're here for your inaugural appearance.  
  
A.J. Murphy, Chief Operating Officer of Private Equity Strategies, Blackstone: Thrilled to be here. Thank you.  
  
Christine Anderson: Sporting the, you know, the dual sleeveless looks today. Arm wrestle you later.  
  
A.J. Murphy: Absolutely. Yes. 
  
Christine Anderson: I think you would win.  
  
A.J. Murphy: I don't know about that.  
  
Christine Anderson: I think you would win. 
  
A.J. Murphy: We’ll try at the end.  
  
Christine Anderson: Judging by those arms. All right. Diving into more serious topic. Reason I wanted you to come on, you've been in this industry for nearly 30 years across multiple cycles. And I'm just curious what you think is the prospect of getting deals done in a rate environment like we have today? 
  
A.J. Murphy: You know, it's a good question because the market is complicated. Rates are rising, that's getting a tremendous amount of headlines. Having said that, deals are getting done. We actually see a really good pipeline going into the next several months, kind of across the industry. The third quarter was the biggest sponsor-generated M&A pipeline of the year of all the quarters. 
  
Christine Anderson: And then any sectors that you particularly are looking at or like right now?  
  
A.J. Murphy: You know, we are very busy in particular, I would say, within each of our energy and defense sectors. You know, in the case of energy, there's been a nice tailwind for some amount of time. And, you know, a lot of that is around power, as you can imagine. And it's been a pretty nice cycle that's run a couple years now, and it's really only accelerating. So, we continue to see both a lot of buying and selling activity within our own team in that sector. And I would expect that to continue. As… 
  
Christine Anderson: What about defense? 
  
A.J. Murphy: Yeah, defense is definitely one that is as busy as it's been in many, many years. And that is a global phenomenon. It's really something we're seeing in many parts of the world. And what's interesting is not only do you have a lot of stepped-up defense budgets, as you might imagine, that are driving that, but you also have just this technology that's coming into the defense sector that's really driving some very interesting developments as far as what these companies are creating and, you know, we're in the middle of a lot of that and helping finance that.  
  
Christine Anderson: Okay, and then just the case for private equity generally in a rate environment like we have today? 
  
A.J. Murphy: You know, private equity, I think, is something you really need to look at on a longer-term basis. Public markets, yes, they are at all-time highs, they're interesting, they’re an important part of most people's portfolios, without a doubt. They're very concentrated right now. I don't think we've really seen anything like this in terms of how few companies are driving the market and the fact that they're mainly in one sector. Private equity is something very different than that, right? Private equity is very broad-based across sectors, across geography. And I think it's in a pretty important part of most people's portfolio, that over the long term is really gonna create, you know, that broader exposure and wealth, you know, over a longer period of time.  
  
Christine Anderson: Thank you so much for joining us. I appreciate you being here. Hope you'll come back.  
  
A.J. Murphy: Absolutely.  
  
Christine Anderson: And now we're gonna dig a little bit deeper into the macro with Winfield Sickles and the Economic Weather Report.  
  
Christine Anderson: Winfield, thanks so much for being here again.  
  
Winfield Sickles, Co-Head of Global Private Wealth Investment Strategy, Blackstone: Great to be here.  
  
Christine Anderson: Obviously a lot to talk about in the macro-land these days. You've been on the road endlessly, meeting with our clients, meeting with investors. What's the number one thing you're hearing?  
  
Winfield Sickles: It's still rates, constantly, and fair enough, right? It’s been a big move and what’s so interesting to me is that on one hand, you have this geopolitics, these wars, it’s driven energy prices and food prices higher and you’ve seen it in inflation prints over the last week by the way. And then on top of all of that, you have this big pile of government debt. But then on the other hand, you have a super resilient economy, strong corporate earnings, solid consumer, and then... 
  
Christine Anderson: Cause A.J. said deals are still getting done.  
  
Winfield Sickles: Absolutely. And then the AI factor, you know this generational AI infrastructure boom you and I always talk about. So, there’s a real dichotomy in the economy as it pertains to rates. It’s kind of like all of the above in terms of how we got there. The one thing that’s for sure is in the US, we’re lucky. We’re lucky to have an energy independence that I’ve actually started to write a little bit about recently. So that energy independence I think is underappreciated. And then Jon’s been talking about this. The US economy growing above trend makes it easier for us to service those debts relative to other countries. But Christine, we can’t take it for granted. 
  
Christine Anderson: Okay, now we're also entering earnings season, the period where big, you know, public companies are gonna give us a window into their performance. What should we be looking for?   
  
Winfield Sickles: Yeah, there's some important questions. I mean, high level, we want to see this corporate and consumer resilience continue. So you've got to ask for the banks, how is loan growth looking? What does business activity feel like for consumers? Are they spending on the cards? And then are they servicing the debt on those cards so delinquencies don't go up? Gas prices have been high. So in travel and leisure, what does demand look like there? And then more broadly, how is balance sheet health? On the AI side, one thing we have to watch, and you and I have talked about this, is we got really strong cloud revenue in the second quarter. How's that gonna shape up in the third quarter? Stay tuned.   
 
Christine Anderson: Clearly a lot to watch. Before I let you go, I do want to make one quick plug for a piece of content that you post every month. If you follow Winfield on LinkedIn, you can find it. It’s called Notes from the Road. It’s a three-minute read. Three hot takes on what’s happening in the macro, so.  
  
Winfield Sickles: I’m glad I’ve got a subscriber, Christine.  
  
Christine Anderson: At least one. Thanks so much for joining us. And now over to my conversation with Dr. Stephen Hoge of Moderna.   
  
Christine Anderson: Stephen, welcome to Inside Blackstone.  
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: Thank you for having me.  
  
Christine Anderson: We're so psyched you're here. So you grew up in the Midwest. You go to Amherst, you're studying neuroscience. You go to med school, become an emergency room doctor. And then at some point you decide to leave medicine and become a McKinsey consultant. So you do that for seven… 
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: Bit of a turn.  
  
Christine Anderson: Yeah, a little bit of a turn. You do that for seven years and then you decide to leave. And in 2012, you join a two-year-old startup that has this one big idea, which is that something called messenger RNA could be used to prompt the body to create its own medicine. And we all came to know Moderna during the pandemic. I think foundational to this whole conversation is understanding what messenger RNA is. So I'm hoping you can give us a little bit of an explainer on that.  
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: Yeah.So, messenger RNA really is nature's software system. It's nature's information molecule. People usually are familiar with the idea of their DNA or their genes, and they're familiar with the idea of your cells of your body that do all the work, they make proteins, they are you. What they don't realize is the way that your genes communicate with your cells is through this molecule called messenger RNA. It's literally just the instructions of what to do. And all of life, literally all, every cell in all of life, every cell in your body and mine right now, is communicating in messenger RNA. The translation of messenger RNA, you know, is a big idea, but how do you get that messenger RNA, make it, scale it up, get it into the right cells, and do that in a way that's reproducible and ultimately safe for the body. That was the work that had to be done in the ten years between the company was founded and that first COVID pandemic response. It's a very big idea, as you said. Like any big idea it's simple, but requires a tremendous amount of work to pull it through. But it was the idea that drew me to the company in the very beginning.  
  
Christine Anderson: What made you so sure that it would succeed? There were a lot of people at the time that thought maybe it wouldn’t.  
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: You know, first of all, I don't know that I was that sure. What drew me to it was the payoff. The key thing for messenger RNA is if you could use it to treat or prevent one disease, you would be able to treat and prevent many. It would be dozens, it would be hundreds. In fact, my partner, Stéphane Bancel, who’s there from the beginning, would say, Moderna will never be a one drug company. It could be zero or it could be 100, but it can never be one because if you've done it once, just think about that software system, the ability and copy and paste and new medicines would go a dozen, two dozen, a hundred times.  
  
Christine Anderson: So, curious if we fast forward a little bit to COVID, once you had the COVID sequence, Moderna was able to develop, you know, the vaccine within one hour.  
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: Yeah.  
  
Christine Anderson: That, it blew my mind. And then obviously three weeks of a trial, but that's incredible to me. But clearly all the work that went before enabled you to do that.  
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: Yeah.Well, it's an interesting example, the power of messenger RNA as something that you can copy information to, but the challenge technologically that you had. If you take the COVID vaccine, the one that we became most famous for, although I think hopefully we’ll be known for cancer going forward, as well.  
  
Christine Anderson: It sounds like just the beginning.  
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: Yeah. The COVID vaccine, the protein that you make is called the spike protein. And the messenger RNA, there's lots of ways it could make a spike protein, and that's because you think of it encoding it in the different ways that it exists. If you, the same protein, in fact, can be encoded by over 10 to the 80th different messenger RNAs. Now, just to give you a sense of that, that is more variance than there are molecules in the known universe, but you’ve got to pick one. So how do you pick? And what we had done in the ten years before has been building systems that could say, well, if you want to make this protein, this is the messenger RNA sequence that is most likely to be effective, to make the right amount of… 
  
Christine Anderson: Right. 
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: …spike protein. We then ran more experiments and more experiments and eventually ran into human clinical trials. Even before COVID as a pandemic, we had nine different vaccines that we tried in humans. And we learned through all of that, or more importantly, the algorithm learned, here's how you make the best one. So when the COVID pandemic happens and we get the sequence of the COVID virus, SARS-CoV-2, and say you need to make a spike protein, we had had so much experience that we just turned to the algorithm and said, well, what's the one? And it made something called mRNA-1273, and we never made a second.  
  
Christine Anderson: I mean, internally, it had to be a moment, right?  
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: Yeah. 
  
Christine Anderson: I mean what was that like? 
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: Well, there were many moments along the way, but I think we all lived a lifetime, a long lifetime in 2020 and 2021. Each one of those moments were all compressed together. And each moment lasted so short that you almost never had that one great story. It was more like, well, that's great. What's next?  
  
Christine Anderson: We're obviously at a moment where there's so much news about AI, there's so much concern, fear, et cetera. And yet, the bright shining light is that what it might do for human health. So I, I'd love to hear your take on where that goes and sort of the case for optimism there.  
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: Yeah, the case for optimism starts, in my mind, in productivity, meaning humans are incredibly committed to improving health. We're incredibly creative and pretty intelligent beings, broadly speaking, but there are limits to how quickly we can move and how productive we can be. And a lot of what we're seeing, whether it's sequence design and messenger RNA drugs or protein design, or the ability to rapidly design and enroll clinical trials. All of these are things that intelligence, artificial intelligence, are really accelerating and dramatically, like things that used to take an entire team of strategists or scientists to do, now one can do in a dramatically shorter period of time. That kind of productivity gain, by itself, has to have a huge impact on how people move forward with addressing health. I think the next frontier is this question of discovery, right? Can that form of intelligence move from helping us be much more productive, faster in designing the drug we want to make to maybe helping us say, this is the drug that you want to make, suggesting an idea, maybe seeing around a corner. In certain spaces, and I really think in individualized medicine, that will become the key that will do some of the unlock. In other spaces, where we're talking about medicines for large numbers of people, humans are pretty good at that discovery as well. And it's not as clear to me that artificial intelligence will make us that much more productive. We treat people with our hands, help address their disease. You're not a collection of, you know, just ones and zeros in a machine. You're actually a living, breathing thing. You're mostly carbon. And for that reason, and because that's the thing that motivates all of us is our, not just our intellectual lives, but also our physical existence. That will always be an important part.  
  
Christine Anderson: Not to put you on the spot, but, the rapid acceleration of drug discovery, is that speeding it up by a number of years? Is that, are there areas where we should, in the next three-to-five years, start to see cures that are gonna change the world?  
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: Yeah.I hope so, I think so. I do think though, the discovery process can take an eternity or it can take a couple of years and making that shorter and shorter and shorter, even if you brought that process down to a period of months or weeks, it doesn't take care of everything else that has to happen before we can really confidently say we're treating and curing diseases. And so, while you will be able to, I think, compress the discovery process and maybe accelerate some of that clinical trial development process, you're ultimately going to have to measure outcomes in a human. And if that outcome is whether or not your cancer comes back in three years, we're gonna have to wait three years to know. And that's the reality of the difficult part of clinical, you know, drug development that the biotech industry is constantly working on.  
  
Christine Anderson: So very measured answer, which I respect. But for people out there that are either have a diagnoses or a loved one, or even family trait right that they worry about. What are the areas where you feel like AI is gonna start to speed up the discovery piece at a minimum? Can I try to pin you down?  
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: Yeah. Look, I think in the places where discovery really needs to take in much more information then we currently have access to. I think those are the places where personalization or individualization of treatment are gonna matter the most. And most of those are in or around your immune system. So, cancer, autoimmune disease, to some extent infectious diseases because everybody's immune system is also individual.  
  
Christine Anderson: Let's dive deeper into the individualized medicine. Let's first start with the news you had out this summer around the melanoma trial. So give us just a, the real quick layman's take of what that news was, what happened.  
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: Yeah.Well I'll describe it in the context of the phase two trial because the phase three results are coming out and, you know,  we've pointed at phase two. There have been a revolution in melanoma treatment over the last couple of decades with these antibodies called PD-1 or immunotherapy. People kind of are familiar with them. Keytruda is a drug from our partner Merck that does this. Melanoma used to be a death sentence. It used to very unfortunate. So the world set about for the last two decades and saying, well, can we do better? Can we add more to your immune system to help it clear your melanoma so it never comes back? What if we could teach your immune system what your cancer looks like? Instead of just getting you know, angry, if you will, and running around the body saying, are there any cancer cells here? Could we actually train it on what your cancer looks like? Could we create a version of a product that helps your immune system see your specific cancer? And here was the challenge. Everybody's cancer was different. They're called neoantigens because they literally only exist in you. And so as your cancer grows up, it acquires all of these mutations. Those mutations are entirely specific to the cancer itself. Your cancer is the only one that will have them. And if we're gonna try and create a product that teaches your immune system what your cancer looks like, we effectively have to make a product for you, one time, and it will never work for anybody else because nobody else will ever have your individual melanoma mutations. That technological challenge was why people had never really figured out how to do anything more targeted before. And once we did, which took us from about 2015 to 2019, and once we showed we could safely do it in humans, generate, you know, those T-cell responses, teach your immune system what your cancer looks like, we finally in 2019, were able to go run the experiment that people had been talking about for a couple of decades, which is could we now go generate an immune response, teach your immune system what your cancer looks and do better than all this nonspecific immunotherapies. And that was the result that we announced, finally, earlier this summer with a clinically significant improvement over immunotherapy. If you look back at that phase two, it's another 50% improvement over those things that had previously been really the gold standard for how we treat cancer.  
  
Christine Anderson: Such a game changer moment, right? The idea that, you know, if you think about it, if we were treating cancer, right, treating everyone the same with the same medicine, right? And then to know that you, all of a sudden, could target in a way that actually might make a difference is just, is incredible.  
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: It's the all of a sudden part, that people always forget about in science and engineering.  
  
Christine Anderson: That, right. That it was everything that came before.  
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: Even COVID. You'd say… 
  
Christine Anderson: Right.  
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: …like, these are overnight success, ten years in the making. It is a decade of work to go from idea to even being able to ask the question in science. And a lot of that work is about the engineering that has to go into making sure you can, you know, make this work.  
  
Christine Anderson: Talk to me about just the engineering side of it, the logistics of this. I mean, you had, was it 1,300 individuals in this melanoma cancer trial?  
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: Yeah.  
  
Christine Anderson: I mean how do you do this? Create an individualized medicine for each and every person.  
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: Yeah, and I'll add one more trick to it. You gotta do it in six weeks. So the way this works is this particular trial, there's been thousands treated, but this particular is about 1,100 to 1,200 people in it. And they're in 42 countries around the world. And about 700 or 800 of them need to get an individual vaccine. The others are getting a placebo, a standard of care. And so we need to deliver almost 1,000 individualized medicines, but you don't know when they come in, right? So patients come in. I've got a new melanoma. I see my oncologist. The surgeon takes it out. They say, wow, you're a candidate for this clinical trial. Do you want in? And they send us that tissue. That tissue gets sequenced to identify what is the signature, what are all the mutations that that individual's cancer has that really are unique to it, that their immune system maybe could see, think of it as almost like a mugshot, if only they had it, right? And then they could go about trying to help prevent that cancer. So, we identify in melanoma about 34 neoantigens, think of ‘em as 34 almost signature mutations, fingerprints, of your, of the cancer. They are only present in that individual's melanoma cells and not in any of their healthy cells. And then once we have that information from the sequence, we select those 34, design an mRNA, again there's lots of different variants, but the algorithm does that, and manufacture that product for that individual. We deliver them nine doses of a product made only for them. And we need to get that back to them, on average, in about 42 days, about six weeks. Because that's when they're going to start their cancer treatment. We did that 800 times in, across 42 countries just to be able to execute the clinical trial.  
  
Christine Anderson: How do you think you take something that you just described and really scale it? I mean, is it feasible… 
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: Yeah. 
 
Christine Anderson: …to do that for the masses?  
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: So, the interesting thing is the way you scale is different. We, for COVID, you had to scale up. You had to make more of, everything you were doing, you had make more it. For cancer, individualized cancer, we had to scale down and then scale out. It’s copying it. But that scale-out is actually pretty easy. One more operator can oversee four more machines if we can get them up and running and you just kind of start building those out. And so that scale-out actually had to happen for us just to run these clinical trials. And so if you look at the overall clinical program, we're gonna enroll 4,000 or 5,000 people to treat their individual cancers over these studies. The one we were just talking about was about 1,000. And, because that scale, thousands of patients a year is actually meaningful for cancer, and tens of thousands is actually really meaningful for cancer. We're well on the path and already operating at scales that we think are essentially commercial.  
  
Christine Anderson: What about investors? Are there pieces of this that you think the market's underestimating?  
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: Probably there's an underestimation of some of the challenges of how it will impact our economic activities as humans. You are ultimately going to have to make a medicine and run it in clinical trials. In order for the FDA to say you can now talk to patients about that and explain it to them. And those sorts of physical limitations are real and can’t move at the same pace of AI expansion of capabilities that we’re seeing.  
  
Christine Anderson: How do you think about the capital that's going to be required to achieve this world that we hope will come, even if it takes a little bit of time. What do you see as the necessary requirements to be able to fund it?  
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: If we accelerate dramatically the pace of ideas and don't accelerate the, dramatically, the amount of capital invested in, let's say, biotech, R&D, or, you know, or in technology manufacturing in our space. Then we'll just run into the limits of, you know, well, this is how many clinical trials you can run, and this is how many, you know, drugs you can manufacture at that facility, relatively quickly. I don't think that will scale at the same pace as the investments that are happening, if you will, in the AI space. In part because we have still that physical limit. You have to enroll a thousand people with skin cancer. You can say, well, what if I can enroll 10,000 people with stage three skin cancer? Well, there aren't that many, in a year, in time for you to run those trials. You'll have to wait, or there are in the United States, but that would be everybody in a clinical trial and that's not the way the mechanics work. You can't do 100,000. So, I think that there's still gonna be some pacing in the amount of investment in the translating all of this innovation into economic impact.  
  
Christine Anderson: I mean, it sounds like all this, just the physical infrastructure required to do this is a lot. 
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: Yeah, but we've been doing this already. The history of the company over the last, you know, 10 or 15 years, and frankly, most of biotech is raising money from investors. We had the privilege of working with Blackstone, actually, on an example of that. And so we, a, you know, a couple years ago, were advancing a completely new way to try and prevent influenza based on our technology. We kind of got to a moment where what was needed was a big efficacy study to show the world that it was a better way to make a flu vaccine. That it, you know, could protect people better than the standard dose products that were out there. And it was a large investment. It was coming at a time… 
  
Christine Anderson: $750 million.  
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: $750 million. It was coming at a time when we were spread thin between cancer and investing in infrastructure and some of these other things. And we were incredibly, you know, privileged to have a relationship already with Blackstone, get to talk about this program and benefit from really two things. First was the capital, that $750 million which allowed us to go run that study. But actually the expertise in this case was just as important to us because it allowed us to benefit from, you know, refinements to that study. That trial ended up being successful. I'm so proud to say that that trial led to a filing and an approval with the FDA this year. And actually, my family and me are on label for that flu vaccine and received it this year, so we're so grateful… 
  
Christine Anderson: That’s great.  
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: …even personally to do that.  
  
Christine Anderson: Turning to another topic entirely. In Pennsylvania, we're seeing a thousand cases of measles, something we haven't seen in more than decades to have that numbers. How should we think about that to have these diseases coming back?  
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: Yeah. It's really unfortunate because one of the things that we've lost is that understanding of many of these diseases, the impact they can have on communities and on individuals and not just those at highest risk, but certainly those at high risk of severe outcomes. There have been deaths, unfortunately. And we've lost memory of that because you know, frankly, we don't see it very much anymore. You know, things like polio, things like smallpox, things like measles, had been relegated to the past. And so, I think what we need to do is step in and remind people of that’s what’s really happening here. You know, absolutely have a right to make an individual choice. But there are impacts on folks in your community that can be quite life-threatening. And that's why generally, over the long arc of our public health in this country, we've all tried to take a collective sense of responsibility. But we have to continue to have that conversation.  
  
Christine Anderson: So I wanna ask a little bit about the Moderna journey. So, certainly when you joined this small research company and now today it's this, you know, massive enterprise, how do you think a little bit about that transition?  
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: Yeah, I, we’re still pretty small. We, you know, we were, we've grown a bit since the pandemic era, but, you know, we used to joke that we were a hundred times smaller than all the other companies, you know, Pfizer or the big pharma companies that were dealing with the pandemic. Now we're only like 20 times smaller, but we're still a relatively small group. But it is a dramatic change from the place I joined. You know, it was, I joined a company of about 20 people, we're now about 5,000. We think we really are just getting started. And we're always just working on that next medicine, you know. We're excited to share the data in cancer, but I have to tell you, I am really looking forward to our first pivotal rare disease, rare genetic disease trial. It's in a patients, in a disease called propionic acidemia. These are kids missing an enzyme in their liver that causes them to, you know, crash out, be hospitalized, and die whenever they get just a little bit ill. They just don't have the metabolic reserve to pull through an illness. Very small numbers, about a thousand people in the world, and absolutely devastating disease for those families and individuals. We've been working for the same ten years on that PA drug. And this year, in the next couple of months, we'll get that first clinical trial result, that phase three equivalent. We hope to be able to then, if it's successful, move forward and make the drug available to that whole community.  
  
Christine Anderson: So I'm still new at this, but it's so interesting to me that most people I've interviewed so far all have this sort of just getting started mentality… 
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: Yeah. 
  
Christine Anderson: …which is so interesting. You also talk a lot about optimism and just curious to get your take on why that is so core to your philosophy? 
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: Well, I think, being, you know, being in an entrepreneurial space like biotechnology, but also being in a space like science or medicine where, you know, the core belief is if I work hard, if we work hard together, if we can solve some problems, we might be able to make tomorrow better. Not that we're guaranteed to, but optimism is an idea is just that we can do better.   
  
Christine Anderson: You had this line I love, which is that optimism is your great privilege. 
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: Yeah.  
  
Christine Anderson: WhichI thought it was just a really cool way to put it.  
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: Yeah.  
  
Christine Anderson: What would you encourage students, maybe even students that are interested in STEM to… 
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: Yeah.  
  
Christine Anderson: …study today?  
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: Oh, I think STEM is phenomenal. And so I would, obviously being a neuroscience background, I would put in every plug for all of the fields. But I don't think that you should end in STEM alone. How do all of this disruption play out in our social fabrics, right? Who defines for humans as we create intelligence, artificial or otherwise, or as we see disruptions in our lives, who writes the rules for how we work out?  
  
Christine Anderson: Okay, so STEM plus… 
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: Humanities.  
  
Christine Anderson: STEM plus humanities.  
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: What makes humans special is that we're not a bunch of individuals. We are able to get together and do far more in groups than any individual ever could. 
  
Christine Anderson: I love that. Okay, so this might be a little off the wall, but I always find it so interesting to ask very successful people about their personal habits. I heard you're fasting today, that you fast every Thursday. Is that true?  
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: I have been an intermittent faster. So I don't eat food on Mondays and Thursdays. I haven't done it for almost ten years. I happen to have really fallen in with the science of intermittent fasting. I believe very deeply in that.   
  
Christine Anderson: Tell me. Tell me. Tell me more.  
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: We're fortunate in this country. But if you're always going, going, going, it's like more sugar, more sugar, more sugar, and you never go, you know, more than a few hours before that next meal, you're constantly in like build, build, build but you actually get yourself run a bit down. For me, it has been, you know, two days a week for ten years.  
  
Christine Anderson: Always Monday and Thursday.  
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: Yeah, and the interesting thing about it is, you realize how that food noise, was just noise. There's a little bit of a metaphysical component for me of realizing that you can just turn off that noise, with practice, and, you know, as hungry as I am on Wednesday and Friday, I am not on Thursday.  
  
Christine Anderson: Hopefully you're not too hangry… 
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: No.  
  
Christine Anderson: …but you seem lovely. So thank you so much again, Stephen, for joining us. I really appreciate it. You've been a great guest and learned so much.  
  
Dr. Stephen Hoge: My pleasure, thank you so much.  
  
Christine Anderson: Thank you.  
  
Christine Anderson: I'm here with Nick Galakatos in the Debrief. Nick, thanks for joining us.  
  
Dr. Nicholas Galakatos, Global Head of Life Sciences, Blackstone: Thanks for having me.  
  
Christine Anderson: Nick oversees our life sciences business and knows a lot about the topics we're gonna discuss. And also, thank you for inviting Stephen on. You guys have known each other for a long time.  
  
Dr. Nicholas Galakatos: He's a really interesting guy. He, you know, emergency room doctor and a McKinsey graduate, so both decisive and eloquent. 
  
Christine Anderson: Could have talked to him all afternoon, super interesting. He talked a lot about cancer research and autoimmune diseases being sort of the first instance where AI will probably really help us unlock new cures and treatments.  
  
Dr. Nicholas Galakatos: When you have a form of cancer, for example, there's not just one thing that typically causes it, there are many, many things that work together to cause it. And even if you biopsy a tumor and you look at tumor cells, they're all different. They're not the same. So it's not a single shot, a single molecule, a single drug can deal with it effectively and kill all cancer cells. You need some other way of doing it. So the traditional way is combination therapy or chemotherapy that is agnostic. It doesn't, it just kills everything. But as you, as we all become a lot more knowledgeable about human biology and what works well, and most importantly, what's also safe for the patient with very few side effects, then you have to think about hitting multiple targets, multiple little markers on cancer cells at the same time. And mRNA technology, what Moderna has developed, is uniquely, uniquely suited for this type of approach to oncology. And they demonstrate it in a phase to be trialed, which is really, really exciting. 
  
Christine Anderson: So fascinating to see something that we all thought was connected to the flu now be a major unlock in cancer research.  
                 
Dr. Nicholas Galakatos: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And we're big believers in the RNA, messenger RNA technology. It's extremely versatile. It's very easy to manufacture. You can adapt it to an individual or you can adapt to millions of people. And well, we've voted with our pocketbooks, as you know.  
  
Christine Anderson: Yeah, well, $750 million to support the new Moderna flu vaccine, so clearly you, you're a believer.  
  
Dr. Nicholas Galakatos: We are. We're very excited and well, the clinical data are very compelling. The flu vaccine, we’ve in a clinical trial, phase three trial, in about 40,000 or 50,000 patients globally showed that it's 30% better than the standard of care, the standard flu vaccine that you go to CVS… 
  
Christine Anderson: Right.  
  
Dr. Nicholas Galakatos: …and you get a vaccine every year. And the FDA agreed. So the, this vaccine was approved in August and it's at a pharmacy near you.¹  
  
Christine Anderson: It's so great.Well, so wonderful to hear about all the promise of AI-enabled drug discovery. And so wonderful to have you on Nick, thank you for being here.  
  
Dr. Nicholas Galakatos: It's my pleasure.  
  
Christine Anderson: And thank you for joining us on this week's episode of Inside Blackstone. Don’t forget to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.  
  
Notes:  
1) MFLUSIVA is FDA-approved in the U.S. only for adults 50 and older. It is not approved for younger people or outside the U.S., and it may not be available at all pharmacies. Please refer to the FDA's website for more information on MFLUSIVA’s approved indications for use, safety, and effectiveness: https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/vaccines/mflusiva. 
  
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