How the biotech investor behind Moderna is using the ‘immigrant mindset’ to take on COVID-19

At a time when the world is just waking up to all the ways in which the planet was woefully ill-prepared for a new, highly contagious pathogen and the global pandemic it has wrought, Noubar Afeyan, founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering, a Cambridge, Mass., biotech incubator, is thinking about the technology that will prevent such a catastrophe from ever happening again: “a pathogen defense shield.”

“You don’t wait until there is an all-out pandemic to come up with a vaccine or a treatment,” Noubar tells Fortune’s Alan Murray on this week’s episode of Fortune’s “Leadership Next” podcast. “You put