Sossy Dombourian

Sometimes life comes full circle. Last week, I had the honor and privilege of visiting The @WhiteHouse to receive the National Medal of Technology and Innovation (NMTI) on behalf of @moderna_tx, alongside Hamilton Bennett, who led Moderna's COVID vaccine development team. The NMTI is the nation’s highest honor for technological achievement, bestowed by the President of the United States and administered by the US Patent and Trademark Office @uspto. It brought to mind the company’s formative days in Flagship labs and our foundational patents that enabled a uniquely programmable medicines platform. I also thought about my friend and longtime collaborator Bob Langer of MIT, himself a National Medal of Science recipient, and the very first meeting he and I had that led Flagship Pioneering to create and build Moderna starting in 2010 with Bob as a co-founder. Our bold proposition was that #mRNA could be harnessed to instruct the body to make any protein it needed, inside the patient’s body. Nearly 15 years later, with lots of ups, downs, highs, lows and detours along the way, Moderna persevered and pioneered, paving the way to not only tame a global pandemic, protecting billions of lives and saving millions more, but also to creating a whole new class of powerful medicines providing protection against a range of infectious diseases and working with partners to develop other medicines that may drastically reduce mortality in certain cancers. I truly believe Moderna’s positive impact on human health is in its earliest stages. Also full circle: to be joined alongside other scientists from Massachusetts Institute of Technology where I received my PhD and now serve as a trustee on the executive committee (see the proud photo of MIT’s medalists below). A final full circle moment: Friday’s ceremony was held in the Indian Treaty Room, a ceremonial room in the Eisenhower Executive Office building on the White House grounds. I was told that when vaccines first became available to government employees in early 2021, this very same room was where White House employees lined up to receive their lifesaving mRNA vaccines. It reminded me of the circle of scientific innovation, from idea to hypothesis to experiment to conclusion to execution, and on to the next idea. The promise of scientific progress remains the most powerful path forward for our people and our planet, and it was deeply meaningful to be among so many heroes and heroines pushing its boundaries and expanding its frontiers each day. @FlagshipPioneer @NSF @WHOSTP @NSTMF #STEM #STEMed #nms #nmti #nationalmedaloftechnologyandinnovation #nationalmedalofscience #STEMexcellence #STEMaward #POTUS #medalofscience #medaloftechandinnovation