This weekend in Montreal, @sunita_krishnan shared her deeply moving story with the @AuroraPrize_ community. Thank you to my friend @IgnatiusPost for bringing it to a wider audience in @washingtonpost today. Sunitha’s life and work continue to make an extraordinary difference for women and children - more than 33,000 to date. She embodies the courage, compassion, and moral clarity at the heart of Aurora.

Flagship announces the formation of Etcelera, a new company that brings together the platforms of @cellaritybio, @Empress_Tx and @etiome with Flagship’s @Flagship_PI capabilities to scale causal intelligence in human biology. Learn more:

Making medicines is really hard. Excited to share some early work from the team @generate_biomed with our partners @AnthropicAI on how we can leverage agentic tools to rapidly advance science. While it is still early days, the signals are very promising and patients are waiting.

Flagship Founder and CEO @NoubarAfeyan joined @LizClaman on @FoxBusiness’ The Claman Countdown to discuss the Phase 3 trial data for @Merck and #FlagshipFounded# @moderna_tx’s mRNA-based therapy for melanoma. The results mark the first positive Phase 3 trial for an individualized neoantigen therapy and for an mRNA-based cancer therapy — a major milestone for personalized cancer treatment. Watch the full conversation here:

It was a great honour to present the results of the phase 3 INTerpath-001 clinical trial at the #ESMO26# Congress in Madrid. This international trial included 1137 patients, across 157 sites, whose melanoma had been surgically removed, but who were at very high risk of it returning. The trial showed adding #intismeran# autogene, an mRNA based individualised neoantigen therapy, to pembrolizumab reduced the risk of recurrence or death by 42%. This is the first phase 3 study to show that a treatment built from the unique ‘fingerprint’ of a patient’s own tumour can reduce the risk of recurrence or death from cancer. That fingerprint is read by sequencing the tumour, then a ‘wanted poster’ of the cancer is made as mRNA, showing the immune system exactly what to look for and attack. Having succeeded in melanoma, this proof of concept could mark the beginning of a foundational shift in how we treat cancer. Read more > A huge thank you to all patients and teams involved. @myESMO @Sydney_Uni @syd_health @Science_Academy @AAHMS_health @FulbrightAUS @NthSydHealth @ausoftheyear

America, to me, has always been defined by the belief that our future can be better than our past. I see it in entrepreneurs launching startups to remake industries; in scientists proposing bold hypotheses to transform what we know about the world; and maybe most of all, in immigrants leaving behind everything they know to pursue a better life here in our great melting pot. Optimists know the future is ours to shape. You can see it in every story on this list. I’m proud to be included.I wrote a longer piece about America’s unique knack for constant self-reinvention in @BostonGlobe earlier this year:

MIT announces the MIT for America initiative. The effort aims to help U.S. learners from kindergarten to community college, with an emphasis on math, making, and the constructive use of AI.

It was a pleasure to join the @BBGNewEconomy Forum in New Delhi this week, where I participated in a discussion about what may be one of the most consequential opportunities of our time: using AI-powered machine intelligence and human intelligence to deepen our understanding of nature and accelerate scientific discovery; what we call “Polyintelligence." AI can help us move from trial and error toward the design of new medicines, materials, and systems, expanding what scientists can see, imagine, and build - endeavors that @FlagshipPioneer pursues every day. The opportunity is extraordinary, and realizing it responsibly will require us to pair ambition with thoughtful guardrails that build trust. Thank you to my fellow panelists @kiranshaw of @BioconGroup and @LilaIbrahim of @GoogleDeepMind, and to @flacqua of @Bloomberg for facilitating such a rich discussion. See the full conversation here:

Honored to receive the Simon Ramo Founders Award from my colleagues at @theNAEng. As I said in my remarks, which you can read in full below, engineers are more important now than ever. Thank you again for this recognition. "When I began my career, the idea that biology and engineering could fuse to form a new field was nascent. In fact, I was one of the first PhD’s to graduate from MIT with a degree in biochemical engineering. But extending the principles of engineering to biology is the logical next step in a long-running pattern. Over the last century or so, we’ve learned the rules of disciplines from chemistry to physics and can increasingly engineer the outcomes we want, rather than trying to blindly produce them through trial and error. I’ve spent my career trying to make that true for biology, too – and with new AI tools I’m confident we will make more progress on it in the next four years than we have in the last 40. At its root, I see engineering as a belief that humans can exert our agency on the world and shape it to our needs and desires. It’s an expression of optimism that the world can be better, and that we can make it so. There’s a quote attributed to Simon Ramo, the namesake of this award and a founder of the NAE, that I think sums up the engineer’s optimism. A rocket he was testing lifted 6 inches off the launchpad and immediately exploded. He looked to his team and said, “Now we know it can fly, all we need to do is improve its range a little bit.” That’s the spirit of the engineer, whether in aeronautics or biology, and it’s the spirit that continues to animate this Academy and its work. It’s a reason to look to the future with hope, no matter what challenges may come. Engineers have for generations built our future, and we are needed more than ever. Thank you again for this honor.”

Today Flagship launches @irislabsinc. Its iris chat uses a novel approach to help AI recognize nuance and engage productively in subjective, emotionally complex conversations - all with sophisticated safety scaffolding built in. I encourage you to read more about iris’ innovative platform here:

Looking forward to discussing this new agreement and more with @ForeignPolicy this afternoon in New York. You can watch live here starting at 3:20pm ET: Breakthrough innovation is the best tool we have to defend against evolving biological threats; this is a new model for the government and private sector to partner to leverage it.

Late last week I got @moderna_tx's mRNA vaccines - one each for flu and Covid. Sitting in the @cvspharmacy in Kendall Square, I couldn’t help but reflect on the long and winding road from launching Moderna in 2010 to this moment. Not only have we proven that mRNA vaccines are safe and effective for treating Covid, RSV, and the flu, we are showing that the same technology has significant promise to treat cancer. We are realizing the vision we had so many years ago, of an mRNA platform that we can apply to treat a wide range of terrible diseases. And to see it in action, all I had to do is go to my local pharmacy. Long and winding though the road may be, I have a feeling we’re still only at its beginning. I’m proud of the pioneers at Moderna who have helped get to this point and are working every day to extend the platform to other major unmet medical needs. As an aside: I urge everyone to get your vaccines this fall. It can be easy to forget that flu was once a leading cause of death in the United States. Six years ago Covid killed an estimated 15 million people in 24 months. I don’t take it for granted that we have the tools to take on these viruses - throughout history, most people did not. @CVSHealth

Today we announced that three abstracts on intismeran autogene, our investigational mRNA-based individualized neoantigen therapy, have been accepted for presentation at the European Society for Medical Oncology (@myESMO) Congress 2026, which will be held October 23–27 in Madrid, Spain. Read more:  #ESMO26#

When we invest in the scientific method and resolve uncertainty with data instead of opinion, we get advances like the new @moderna_tx medicine that’s showing promise to treat cancer in conjunction with @Merck. Glad to join @WalterIsaacson to talk about the science behind mRNA medicines, and what they can tell us about the strengths of the U.S. scientific enterprise. You can watch the full interview here:

From one idea to support reaching thousands of families across #Armenia#. 💙 UNICEF & Afeyan Foundation (#AIFA#) have worked together to bring psychosocial support closer to children, adolescents & parents. #Foreverychild#, partnerships that create lasting change.

In a new Boston Globe Opinion essay, MIT President Emeritus L. Rafael Reif calls for a simple, globally understood “moral floor” for AI: principles that keep people in ultimate control and prohibit deception, harm, exploitation, and evasion of human oversight.

Today we announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved the supplemental Biologics License Applications for the 2026-2027 formulas for Spikevax® (COVID-19 Vaccine, mRNA) and mNEXSPIKE® (COVID-19 Vaccine, mRNA), containing the JN.1-lineage XFG subvariant of SARS-CoV-2 to help prevent COVID-19. Read more:

Congratulations to our @ProFoundTx and @gatesfoundation on this innovative investment agreement. Eclampsia and preeclampsia affect millions of mothers and babies each year, but are woefully understudied. Combining this new support from the Gates Foundation with ProFound’s proprietary AI capabilities and knowledge of the expanded human proteome will open new paths to treating these diseases and saving lives around the world.

Pancreatic cancer was long considered one of medicine’s deadliest diagnoses. But today, the FDA approved @RevMedicines' Daraxonrasib - a new treatment that has in trials nearly doubled how long patients survive compared to standard chemotherapy. Daraxonrasib works by targeting a molecule, KRAS, that until now was considered undruggable. The story is a reflection of biotech at its best - pioneering what was once believed impossible, persevering through booms and busts, bringing together enabling research, academic labs, and industry to create breakthroughs for patients and their families.  The FDA deserves our commendation for approving this life-changing treatment with the urgency it demanded, and for moving quickly to allow patients to begin accessing it even before formal approval. Who can say how many lives have been extended - how many more birthdays and weddings and anniversaries will be celebrated - thanks to this wonder of science. Here’s to continuing the momentum on revolutionary new treatments for cancer.