Dr Noubar Afeyan of Flagship Ventures presents IGHI's annual lecture.

Imperial’s Institute of Global Health Innovation (IGHI) was delighted to welcome Dr Noubar Afeyan to London on Monday to host their fourth Annual Lecture.

Dr Afeyan joins previous speakers including Editor of the Lancet - Richard Horton, international champion of patient safety and public health - Sir Liam Donaldson, and Dean of the School of Public Health at Harvard, Dr Julio Frenk.

Dr Afeyan, founder, Managing Partner and CEO of Flagship Ventures, a leading early stage venture capital firm, gave an inspiring talk about disruptive innovations in life sciences. He drew on his experience from his own start-up ventures to discuss how we can use disruptive innovations to create added value in healthcare innovation.

During Dr Afeyan’s 25-year career as inventor, entrepreneur, CEO and venture capitalist, he has co-founded and helped build 26 successful life science and technology start-ups.

Dr Afeyan used real examples of some of his recently created ventures including Moderna Therapeutics (mRNA-based therapeutics), Seres Health (Ecobiotics to treat the Gut Microbiome) and Pronutria (Pharmaconutrient proteins), to illustrate how these disruptive innovations are enabling valuable healthcare products today.

His talk also described the process by which Moderna, Seres, Pronutria and many other startups were conceived and developed following a novel, innovation paradigm based on evolution and emergence.

By creating dedicated learning environments that combine classrooms and action learning, just like medical schools with teaching hospitals, we can better equip students with the tools needed for lifelong careers in entrepreneuring

– Dr Noubar Afeyan

“I was honoured to be invited to speak about life science innovation and very much enjoyed presenting at IGHI’s annual lecture. We are entering a new phase of development for entrepreneurial innovation as we observe technological entrepreneurship emerging as a discipline in its own right. By creating dedicated learning environments that combine classrooms and action learning, just like medical schools with teaching hospitals, we can better equip students with the tools needed for lifelong careers in entrepreneuring, resulting in more effective and efficient diffusion of breakthrough innovations” said Dr Afeyan.

“It was a great pleasure to welcome Dr Afeyan to Imperial and IGHI and would like to thank him for such an inspiring and engaging talk. Innovation lies at the heart of IGHI and I was fascinated to hear about how technological innovation, education and new ways of working and collaborating can lead to a paradigm shift in the way we think about entrepreneurship” said Lord Darzi, Director of IGHI.

Watch the full video recording of the event below.