Episode 101
The data behind the fastest vaccine ever
Data Science Leaders | 30m | October 07, 2026
In January 2020, Stephen Hahn, M.D., had been running the FDA for just a few weeks when the COVID-19 virus sequence was published. Despite the odds, in just eleven months, the first mRNA vaccine was authorized. It was the fastest development of its kind in history. And the part Hahn can't stop thinking about isn't how hard it was. It's what it proved: medicine can move that fast, even though it usually doesn't.
Now, as Chief Executive Officer of Nucleus RadioPharma, he makes a new argument for data science leaders: the hard part in medicine isn’t the science. It’s what we do with the data.
Stephen brings:
- Why he calls AI in molecule discovery “table stakes”
- What leading the largest real-world experiment in history taught him
- How the FDA compressed years into months, and how we can do it again
