The Delivery Problem Behind Moderna's Breakthrough

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“You've gotta get in the house without the alarms going off.”

Örn Almarsson compares therapeutic mRNA delivery to a covert package drop: the payload has to reach the right room, release its contents, and leave without triggering the immune system.

He looks back at Johnson & Johnson, Alkermes, and the relationships that shaped his next move. A referral from Bob Langer led him to Moderna, where he joined a small team working through one of biotech's hardest engineering problems.

The conversation covers layoffs, company transformation, patent cliffs, biotech's feast-and-famine cycles, modified mRNA, and the effort required to scale production from tiny academic batches to grams and kilograms.

Key Topics Covered:

Johnson & Johnson's acquisition-driven model
Organic and inorganic growth
Alkermes company transformation
Leadership through layoffs and change
ARISTADA and long-acting injectables
Biotech volatility and patent cliffs
Regulatory exclusivity and biosimilars
Asset-focused biotech investing
Moderna's early delivery team
Therapeutic mRNA delivery
mRNA manufacturing scale-up
Modified mRNA and immune response

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Find our guest, Örn Almarsson, at these links:

Website: https://www.axelyf.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/orn-almarsson

Find our host, Jon Chee, at these links:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonchee/

Learn more about Excedr:

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Website: https://www.excedr.com

Intro & Outro Songs Created by OkKyojin, OkKyojin:

https://flow.page/kyojin

Resources & Articles:

Nobel Prize: discoveries concerning mRNA vaccines: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2023/press-release/

Alkermes: https://www.alkermes.com/

Johnson & Johnson: https://www.jnj.com/

NCBI Molecular Biology reference: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK21054/

Companies, Universities, & People Mentioned:

Johnson & Johnson: https://www.jnj.com/

Merck: https://www.merck.com/

MIT: https://www.mit.edu/

Eli Lilly: https://www.lilly.com

Alkermes: https://www.alkermes.com/

Harvard Business School: https://www.hbs.edu/

Moderna: https://www.modernatx.com/

Flagship Pioneering: https://www.flagshippioneering.com/

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/

UPS: https://www.ups.com/

Timestamps:

00:06 Intro

01:28 Johnson & Johnson's Acquisition-Driven Model

02:25 Organic Growth, Acquisitions, and Commercialization

04:20 Why Pharma's Growth Strategy Keeps Changing

05:05 Leaving Johnson & Johnson for Alkermes

07:45 Transforming Alkermes Through a Hard Reset

10:03 ARISTADA and the Case for Embracing Change

10:38 Biotech's Volatility and Patent Cliffs

14:26 Regulatory Exclusivity and Biosimilars

16:00 The Shift Toward Asset-Focused Biotech

17:16 The Call That Led to Moderna

20:35 The Delivery Challenge for Therapeutic mRNA

22:48 Scaling mRNA From Micrograms to Kilograms

25:29 Modified mRNA and the Future of RNA Medicine

27:47 Outro