YouSaid · the spoken record

Tal Zaks

lines on the record: 85
first: 2025-01-14
most recent: 2025-01-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Potential. In fact, in the early days, we were more certain of the engineering benefits than we were of the medical benefits in the sense that it wasn't clear is this going to be optimally used for rare diseases, for oncology, for vaccines, or for something that we have yet to discover, because it was all an interplay of delivery and medicine and biology. These were the big risk factors. Once you could engineer the mRNA, you could do it again and again and again and again. You could do it reproducibly, cheaply. That was clear. That was the engineering benefit. But what kind of medicines could you make of it? And so I think the brilliance of Stefan and that initial team before I joined was to set up enough degrees of freedom to go and explore those opportunities in parallel. And so when it was clear early on that vaccine was the straightest shot to proving pharmacology of this technology, we went after vaccines.”
2025-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Tal Zaks - Bridging Science, Medicine, and Returns - [Invest Like the Best, EP.406] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For a certain idea of a drug that would have a certain effect against cancer, and it was a small team, and it was very linear. And it didn't pan out. And one of the lessons I took from that failure is that this was probably not well enough funded and not given enough opportunity either with the team structure or the financial structure or the scientific structure to have that degree of freedom to adjust. And if you look at investments that have been successful, I think you're giving them some degrees of freedom and you've got a management team that has the right functions able to do that. For me, it's another learning from Moderna. If you go back and look in the formative years of Moderna, the strategy was always to develop this technology of mRNA, understanding the engineering potential as much as the medical and biology.”
2025-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Tal Zaks - Bridging Science, Medicine, and Returns - [Invest Like the Best, EP.406] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It means, and when I call ourselves collaborative venture capitalists, it's because at least for me, it's always critical to look at the talent that comes together as much as it is the content. Yes, I get excited by the science of what they're trying to solve, but I have to get excited about the people who have the experience and the wisdom to navigate and understand what it takes. As that book points out, and you correctly point out, it's almost never a straight line. And if it's not a straight line, it means that you need people around the table who have the experience and ability to look around corners, and it means that you need enough of a capital and strategy structure to give you some degrees of freedom of movement. I can tell you early on in my career as an investor, I made an investment in a small company. It was a very rational thought.”
2025-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Tal Zaks - Bridging Science, Medicine, and Returns - [Invest Like the Best, EP.406] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We look to work with other investors. We look to broaden the investor base, but also broaden the competencies we have around the board. For me, the answer has been really a combination of talent of people and the content that we believe has a leg to stand on.”
2025-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Tal Zaks - Bridging Science, Medicine, and Returns - [Invest Like the Best, EP.406] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would argue that the best investors actually learn more from the successes than the failures. And that's not trivial. When you fail, there's a whole bunch of things you can point at as causal elements. But when you succeed, as you say, what was it? Was it luck? Was it talent? Was it getting the right people around the table? It's a combination of factors. And I think the good investors develop this sense of pattern recognition of what works. And as I've tried to uncover it for myself, frankly, out of my own curiosity, I think in the domain in which I function, which is venture capital, and it's very different from private equity or some other corners of investors. But for venture capital, and specifically for what I call collaborative venture capital, which is the type of venture capital we have, which is to say that, yeah, we will often seed companies, but we very quickly look to syndicate the”
2025-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Tal Zaks - Bridging Science, Medicine, and Returns - [Invest Like the Best, EP.406] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I joined one of the best VC firms I could find, Orbimed, because they have a track record of actually being successful. And I wanted to learn the answer to that question. And Lux certainly plays a role, but here's a few thoughts that I think are not as obvious. We all recognize the importance of learning from failure. And I listened to your podcast with Jared Kushner the other day, his version of what is God trying to teach me. And I thought that was extremely well put for many, many years. My favorite quote of all times was Nelson Mandela's, who said, in life, I've either succeeded or I've learned. Coming out of the COVID success, it actually made me realize that's a misguided quote because it suggests that you haven't learned from your successes as much.”
2025-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Tal Zaks - Bridging Science, Medicine, and Returns - [Invest Like the Best, EP.406] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's interesting to sit back and figure out, well, how can we actually radically change it? And I don't know that I have a good answer, although I'm trying. And this is especially, I think, Germaine given the experience we had at COVID.”
2025-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Tal Zaks - Bridging Science, Medicine, and Returns - [Invest Like the Best, EP.406] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Came into the industry. I was super curious always to understand what is the language of the other functions that have to come together to solve this problem. And yes, the physician in the room, but the guys doing the biology and the guys doing the chemistry and the manufacturing, they're just as important. And by the way, one of the reasons I'm now in the investor seat is because I realize from my time in Moderna how critical it is to understand the language of investors and the expectations they have in order to align across this mission to be successful. So it is a multidisciplinary challenge, and that's not going to change. We'll be able to make it more efficient. Yes, these tools are already making an impact in drug discovery. And as we integrate and have better and better ways of looking at human data, I think it will also make a dent in development.”
2025-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Tal Zaks - Bridging Science, Medicine, and Returns - [Invest Like the Best, EP.406] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'll give you an example. So back in the day, if a patient came to me and his platelet counts, these are the blood clotting elements we have in our blood were low for reasons that the physician didn't know, but it would lead to a skin rash because when blood doesn't clot, it will accumulate under the skin. So people would show up with the skin rash. And the patient would come to the physician and the physician would look at him and say, hey, yeah, you have idiopathic thrombocytopenic perpora. Oh god, that sounds scary. Now, what did I just say? Well, all I said is in Latin, you've got low platelets and a skin ration. I don't know why. Idiopathic, I don't know why. Perpera has a skin rash and thrombocytopenia is low platelets. So just by using Latin, we made ourselves sound smart, but the physician had no clue actually what it comes now. Today we learned a little bit about the biology, so it's not as bad as I make it out to be. But you get the picture. And so when I...”
2025-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Tal Zaks - Bridging Science, Medicine, and Returns - [Invest Like the Best, EP.406] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Moral compass that needs to frame how we deploy them. But the other point he makes is that in this age of reason, the way that experts have survived and grown is in silos. And that silo is enshrined in language. And so every discipline develops its own language over time. And it becomes a barrier to common understanding. And if you're trying to solve a multidisciplinary problem, you very quickly realize that one of your greatest barriers is language. I mean, the finance world knows this very well. We coined the term Fed speak. That's clearly an example of language as a barrier constructed on purpose. But we all fall into the trap. And what I realized early on is that physicians are probably as guilty or guiltier than anybody else in doing that.”
2025-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Tal Zaks - Bridging Science, Medicine, and Returns - [Invest Like the Best, EP.406] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's called Voltaire's Bastards, and the subtitle is The Tyranny of Reason in Western Civilization. And he made a point that ever since quote unquote the age of reason, we have mistakenly assumed that science in itself and reason will be an ethical force for good, which of course it isn't. Science and reason are science and reason, but it's the humanistic.”
2025-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Tal Zaks - Bridging Science, Medicine, and Returns - [Invest Like the Best, EP.406] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other functions that need to come together. So if you look at pharma, a project team that tries to make a drug will usually get kicked off around a target. And if they're successful, 10 years later, you will have a drug. But if you look at that project team, you will rarely find anybody around the table who is there at the start. And yet the thing works. The great success of the pharmaceutical industry has been to build these multidisciplinary teams and enable them to progress this very complicated process. Yes, you can cut it short in time if you have the right technology and we can come back to mRNA vaccines as the obvious example of that. But ultimately you do need these different disciplines. And when I started sometime during med school, I chanced upon a really interesting book. And it's by a Canadian philosopher called John Ralston Saul.”
2025-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Tal Zaks - Bridging Science, Medicine, and Returns - [Invest Like the Best, EP.406] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You do. And I think your roundabout sort of coming back to what I think is one of the central tenets that makes this endeavor so different, which is the number of different disciplines that need to come together to solve this is quite wide. I've not found many or maybe any other industry where you need so many different types of expertise around the table to solve the problem. I've spoke about physicians. You need biologists. You need engineers. You need, of course, the financial understanding of all this works. The number of disciplines that actually need to come together is vast. And frankly, it's been one of the fascinating threads of my career. And to the degree that I've been successful, I think it's because I've always been curious not to approach it as the physician in the room, but to try to understand the language of”
2025-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Tal Zaks - Bridging Science, Medicine, and Returns - [Invest Like the Best, EP.406] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I look at investments, I will often tell the folks, look, there are three pockets of capital in my book. There's government, which is what's there for the... There's philanthropy, and then there's us. I'm not in the business of philanthropy and I'm not a government. So for me, the lens has got to be what it is. There are investments that are fit for philanthropy, and there are investments that are right for governments to make because it's not an immediate return. Either the capital scale or more often the time scale and the risk is not commensurate with the money I need to return to my OPs.”
2025-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Tal Zaks - Bridging Science, Medicine, and Returns - [Invest Like the Best, EP.406] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“they may dive in and out once or twice but actually you're there on a weekly quarterly monthly basis with the CEO with the management team with your other board members which is why for me looking at the syndicate of who my partners are for this investment is so critical because this is a long-term commitment there's a lot of capital it's not over and it's likely not even over with this investment round they're going to need more capital down the road I got to make sure I got a reserve I got to make sure I got other colleagues around the table who are also going to be able to be in it for the longer run and so making sure that that syndicate is the right one that I've got colleagues around the table on the board who bring in complementary experiences and expertise to what I bring in so that we can help the CEO and this young management team actually get there those are the other elements that then become that second part of the job”
2025-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Tal Zaks - Bridging Science, Medicine, and Returns - [Invest Like the Best, EP.406] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Deploy capital, but actually to deploy my experience as well. Granted, it's at the board level, but nonetheless, I'm not going to be making investments in fields that I know zero about or I'm not interested in leveraging what I do know. So I think these are the three elements. Now, in terms of process, and I don't think in that regard we're very different, it's really interesting being a venture capitalist, a partner at a firm, you've got two very different sides of the same coin. So the first part of the job is deciding where to deploy capital. So that's the diligence process. You look at an opportunity, you've got a team of junior folks helping you out. You bring in external experts for the stuff you don't know. And what takes four to six to eight weeks and you come to a decision on whether that's worth the investment. Now, if you decide to invest, the next part of it, the coin flips. Because now the diligence team is not going to help you.”
2025-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Tal Zaks - Bridging Science, Medicine, and Returns - [Invest Like the Best, EP.406] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How soon will we know that we've achieved some milestone that people will recognize the value inflection, the value created? One of the most recent opportunities I had that I had to walk away with was a vaccine where it was an interesting idea and it was an early concept, but it became clear that the phase one data are probably not going to be de-risking. You're going to have to take it all the way to phase three to know, okay, now you're asking me for a quantum of capital and a time horizon that is just not commensurate with the risk involved. I have to see my way to building value incrementally over the life of the investment and the additional capital that will be required. So it's got to be the content, the drug, the theme, the scientific content. It's got to be the capital requirement value, and it's got to be the people. What is the talent around the table? What are the missing pieces? Am I going to be able to help you uniquely from my experience to do that? Because I'm here not just”
2025-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Tal Zaks - Bridging Science, Medicine, and Returns - [Invest Like the Best, EP.406] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good question. So, for us, again, I term us sort of as the collaborative spectrum of venture capital, we will invest at any stage starting from seed all the way through public pipes. And so we've got a pretty flexible mandate. For us, I think the key elements as we look at an opportunity, it is, what is the thesis that the STEAM is trying to do? How much capital is required to get to the next value inflection point? What is that next value inflection point? What is the likelihood of achieving it if it's already a drug in the clinic? Okay, what's the transition? If it's an early bed on a target, what's the likelihood of that target panning out? And if it's a different strategy, then we look at it. So it will depend by the stage of investment, but ultimately it boils down to what is the thesis this team is trying to prove for making the world a better place.”
2025-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Tal Zaks - Bridging Science, Medicine, and Returns - [Invest Like the Best, EP.406] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And understanding what natural outcomes are for people with high quality big data sets that you can apply machine learning tools. So our ability to predict outcomes on the control arm is getting better and so people are leveraging those tools to make trials shorter and smaller. But in the end, the gold standard is and will remain, okay, I have to put it in people and see how those people respond and make sure that the people who get this have a better outcome than the people who don't. And I know I've got a new medicine on my hand. And I don't see the tools that we have today in the near future changing that. Now, is there a version of the future where they will? Yes, absolutely, but that will require some level of evolution of our healthcare system.”
2025-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Tal Zaks - Bridging Science, Medicine, and Returns - [Invest Like the Best, EP.406] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think you're seeing a very significant deployment of these modern AI tools across the industry now, and it's very quickly becoming, to a certain degree, commoditized with the advancement of alpha-fold predicting protein structures and people applying the same kind of tools into chemical discovery space to come up with new chemistries. I've seen people even apply these tools into figuring out these lipid nanoparticles that Will Shefford mRNA into different tissues to come up with better formulations and ways of bringing that medicine into the right places in the body. So I think drug discovery is getting a leg up in a significant one from the various applications of AI tools. The part where we're still behind is in what's called development or clinical development, putting it in people. There's no shortcut here. We don't have a holistic model of a human being. We have made progress.”
2025-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Tal Zaks - Bridging Science, Medicine, and Returns - [Invest Like the Best, EP.406] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'd break it down to three phases, and I do think that the world is improving. The first phase is this target for intervention actually relevant to the disease. That's basic biology. And I think we're making great strides there in understanding biological processes. Some of it is big data. Some of it is just old school grunt work. But there's a lot of tools that have been developed that are being deployed that are making this much more accessible. to us understanding disease better. The second has to do with what's called drug discovery. Okay, so I've got a protein I want whose function I want to alter. What is the ability to actually discover a new chemical entity or new protein entity or nucleic acid entity that will actually interfere there, that will actually do the pharmacological effect? And there I...”
2025-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Tal Zaks - Bridging Science, Medicine, and Returns - [Invest Like the Best, EP.406] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's still in the future. The way this works is people with early stage cancer, specifically we started with skin cancer. So cancer has been diagnosed, but it's early. Likely a surgeon will cut it out. And then there's some probability that it will come back. And what can we do to improve the odds that it won't come back? That context, at least as far as randomized phase two goes, when you give a personalized vaccine to those patients, it cuts the recurrence rates of cancer by about half, by about 50%, which is quite significant.”
2025-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Tal Zaks - Bridging Science, Medicine, and Returns - [Invest Like the Best, EP.406] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not going to predict whether the experiment's going to work. People have been trying to do cancer vaccines. I've been trying to do cancer vaccines since I was a postdoc, and so far we haven't. I think this one has a chance of working, and here's why. But until we test it in the clinic, we won't know. And we've been fortunate that that phase too actually read out with quite a successful readout last year. In fact, the phase three now is enrolling, and hopefully we'll have a personalized cancer vaccine on the market before too soon.”
2025-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Tal Zaks - Bridging Science, Medicine, and Returns - [Invest Like the Best, EP.406] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“platform for making vaccines. So, can we immunize people against their cancer? Now, to do that, we'd have to figure out what each individual needs to get immunized against. And so it would be personalized. And that's a very challenging, complicated task. It's expensive. So we set out to do that. And as we were starting down the path, I remember we had a phase two study that was running. So that's basically a study where you give half the people your vaccine and half the standard of care. And the question was, are we actually going to be able to prevent some cancers from returning relative to the comparator? And Stefan used to stop me in the hallway and say, Tal, is this thing going to work? And I'm like, Stefan, I honestly don't know. What I know is I feel I've been put on earth to do the experiment and we've been fortunate to align the technology and the resources, including the financial ones, to run the experiment.”
2025-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Tal Zaks - Bridging Science, Medicine, and Returns - [Invest Like the Best, EP.406] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To enact on it, okay, it requires a process. So what does it actually take to get there? And here's an interesting thing. If you ask an engineer, an engineering problem in their domain, say, I want to get to the moon, is it possible? Well, anybody who knows the domain will tell you, yeah, it's possible. Here's what it's going to take. And they can even map out the resource and the likelihood of it getting there. Well, you ask a physician, hey, I want to cure cancer. Is it possible? And the answer is, I don't know. I mean, I can think of some approaches, but we got to go try them. One of the first things I did when I joined Moderna and probably the scientific thing I'm most proud of in my time there is actually not the COVID vaccine. It's something called a personalized cancer vaccine. So we've learned enough about cancer to know that everybody has a different cancer. Everybody's immune system is different. And we know that mRNA is a phenomenally good.”
2025-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Tal Zaks - Bridging Science, Medicine, and Returns - [Invest Like the Best, EP.406] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Engineers and physicians are almost diametrically opposite in how they think. And I had the good fortune in my life to work with, I think, one of the most brilliant engineer leaders, Stefan Boncel, the CEO of Moderna. And what it taught me is that engineers have two things that physicians struggle with. One is vision and the other is process. So what do I mean by vision? If you look around our life, take a look out your window if you live in the city. Everything you see is a function of vision of people who came before you. It would not otherwise have been there. That's why we love nature so much, because it's uncluttered by visions of other people. But if you live in any other environment, you're constantly faced with a vision. So you have to ask yourself, well, what's my vision for the thing I will leave for the future?”
2025-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Tal Zaks - Bridging Science, Medicine, and Returns - [Invest Like the Best, EP.406] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's where biotech and tech are very different, and we can come back to that. But in biotech, you have to account for two variables that are extremely hard to predict. One of them is whether the biology will pan out, and the other is whether the pharmacology will pan out. Now, biology, it means, is this protein that I think is involved in disease? Is it actually involved in disease? And the pharmacology is, okay, yeah, it is. Now I'm going to change that protein's function. Am I actually able to do it with a drug I have at hand? Does it get to the right place in the body? Does it do its effect? Is it tolerable from a safety perspective? And so those risks of biology and pharmacology are very hard to predict. And some of it has to do with the nature of the beast, if you will. It's not a system we designed. So we're constantly learning about it versus engineers. But some of it, and this is one of my biggest lessons from Moderna, it's also a different mindset.”
2025-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Tal Zaks - Bridging Science, Medicine, and Returns - [Invest Like the Best, EP.406] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a question I've been asking myself quite intensely, as you can imagine, for the past few years. In fact, I joined the venture community because of the excitement around where that branch of technology has the potential to bring us. But one of the things that I think is often lost is the difference in the predictability and the nature of investment in biotech versus some of the other technologies tech and its various manifestations. The challenge is that it's still hard for us to predict what is going to work. And so if you look at what makes a return on investment, it's basically three things. It's how much money you are required versus what you can get at the end, how long it takes you to actually get there. And what is the probability that you will actually arrive at that destination? And that's basically what determines your return.”
2025-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Tal Zaks - Bridging Science, Medicine, and Returns - [Invest Like the Best, EP.406] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was diagnosed when he was 50 with his first MI, and he lived to his mid to late 70s. And he did that because of a generation of drugs that even in his time half were generic, but today all of them are generics. And so the benefit that we bring in what we do is not just the short term during the patent period where all the angst is about pricing. And it's legitimate. And I get it. But somehow society has to also take into account the tail effect of what it is we're doing that is leaving for the next generations.”
2025-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Tal Zaks - Bridging Science, Medicine, and Returns - [Invest Like the Best, EP.406] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, as the infrastructure we set up on the commercial side and the ability to garner return on investment. And the part that is often lost on the public and the people who debate this return is the very Long tail of benefit to society that what we do brings. I happen to be on the board of directors of TEVA, and I'm very proud of that because TEVA is one of the largest and the highest quality generics manufacturer. And people forget that once the brand price erodes and we're in generics land, that now is a benefit to society, all of society across the globe at pennies. father who passed away a few years ago”
2025-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Tal Zaks - Bridging Science, Medicine, and Returns - [Invest Like the Best, EP.406] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He looks at me and he sees my face and he says, Well, clearly I didn't exactly answer your question. So, where did I go wrong? And I said, look, on the tactics, what you're saying is right, but the answer to what we do here is very simple. People give us money. And a number of years later, we need to give them more money back. Otherwise, we're not going to be doing what we're doing And so Framing the potential in terms of return on investment for me has become the focus of this phase of my career because without it This wonderful progress will be for naught. And it's not. By chance, I think The modern armamentarium of medicine has come from the United States. I think it's a combination of the infrastructure we set up on the public side, the National Institutes of Health, Basic Research.”
2025-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Tal Zaks - Bridging Science, Medicine, and Returns - [Invest Like the Best, EP.406] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do this A because those of us in the trenches really believe in the mission, but because there is a need to return capital to shareholders. And a funny way, I've been with this DC firm Orbimed for a little over three years. One of the executives from a large pharma who shall go unnamed. He was at a much more prestigious role than anybody would ever offer me. He came in, knocked on our door, you wanted a role to be a venture partner with us. And on the interview, he tells me about his background. And at a certain point, I've asked him, I sit back and said, let's call him John. John, what is it that you think we do here? And John looks at me and says, Well, you know, you do clinical trials, phase one, phase two Value da da da da da da da da da da da”
2025-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Tal Zaks - Bridging Science, Medicine, and Returns - [Invest Like the Best, EP.406] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Challenge in the current political environment that is dampening, I think, some of the prospects, if you will, or optimism of what is possible. I was invited to give a short talk at one of the panels, the National Academy of Science, Medicine, and Engineering back in Middle of 2024, and it's a panel that asks how do we better align investment and innovation with the unmet need? And so they asked me, okay, given your intersection, what can you tell us? And one of the points I made to them is that investment in innovation. Requires a return on the investment. And I stated this publicly I said, you guys use the term reimbursement. Reimbursement is what I do when I put in my expenses to get paid for a meal or a flight. We don't do this for reimbursement.”
2025-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Tal Zaks - Bridging Science, Medicine, and Returns - [Invest Like the Best, EP.406] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we're overall in a good place. I'm optimistic because the advances in science and technology have been so robust and amazing. Now, that is tempered, I think, by two opposing forces, if you will. The first is the translation of all that wonderful science in a medicine is probably as challenging as it ever was in terms of the unpredictability of what makes a good medicine and we'll come back to that, but also in terms of the public perception and the willingness to pay for innovation, which I think are”
2025-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Tal Zaks - Bridging Science, Medicine, and Returns - [Invest Like the Best, EP.406] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, in a nutshell, I'm a physician scientist who spent all my life figuring out how to translate the wonderful innovations of science in our era into better medicines for patients. I was fortunate to have been trained by some of the best. I trained for more years than I would recommend anybody in the sense of having done an MD, a PhD, a postdoc, a residency, a fellowship, two internships. I mean, you get the picture. And then I finally went out to do something in the world and spent the first part of my career in drug development mostly as an oncologist and oncology drug development. And then the second good chunk of time at Moderna as the chief medical officer developing that as a platform as opposed to anyone medicine. And for the past several years of moved over to the investor side to help aligning the translation of science into medicine with actually a return on investment, realizing how important it is to get”
2025-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Tal Zaks - Bridging Science, Medicine, and Returns - [Invest Like the Best, EP.406] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source