Afeyan graduated from McGill University with a BS in Chemical Engineering in 1983. [25] In 2005 Afeyan and Vardanyan met with Armenian president Robert Kocharyan to present the key directions of the project. He was born to Armenian parents in Lebanon and immigrated with his family in his early teens to Canada. The seeming courage it would take to do these things is rooted in being unrooted, he says. Find them in Quick Start. What keeps you from innovating is being comfortable, he said. In 2000, Afeyan founded Flagship Pioneering to create and fund early-stage start-ups addressing unmet needs in healthcare and sustainability. [1] [9], Afeyan is the founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering, a venture capital company focused on biotechnology, in 2000. Noubar also leads the firm's VentureLabs unit that invents and launches transformative startups. Afeyan also received a Technology Pioneer 2012 award from the World Economic Forum in recognition of the breakthrough solar fuel technology being developed at Joule Unlimited.[11]. I will go to my grave believing it is the platform., 15 Under 40: The Youngest Billionaires On The 2021 Forbes 400, Meet The 44 Newcomers Joining The Forbes 400 List Of America's Richest People. More private capital flowed into early-stage biotech companies and in larger amounts than in any year I can remember. Instead of making protein medicines in factories very far away, what we are trying to do is to inject you with messenger RNA so that your own body will make the protein, said Stphane Bancel in a 2015 interview with CNBC. It was a very difficult time for biology. Register for free Afeyan's father, Badrig, was born in Bulgaria in 1929. After an early exploration went nowhere, Flagship launched its first microbiome startup with Seres Therapeutics, which is creating therapeutics to restore health by repairing the function of an imbalance of microflora, in 2012. The firm has "fostered the development of more than 100 scientific ventures, resulting in $20 billion in total value and over 500 patents. Donald Trump cannot take credit for the vaccines. Born in Beirut, Lebanon, and of Armenian heritage, Dr. Afeyan and his family fled the Lebanese Civil War in the 1970s and settled in Montreal as political refugees. Like many Armenians, Noubar Afeyan's family moved from country to country, trying to find a safe haven. One example is Noubar Afeyan, a Beirut national who earned his PhD at MIT and worked on an H-1B visa before he became a US citizen. During the event, Aurora Co-Founder Noubar Afeyan spoke about Aurora's crucial contribution to tackling the most acute ongoing crises across the world and the pressing #humanitarian issues of . They have the potential to create numerous product opportunities not only in parallel but also in a highly efficient manner as learning effects from platform optimization and program data create a virtuous cycle of innovation and improvement. [15] In 2020 Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan lauded Afeyan, Vardanyan and Gregorian for "glorifying humanity," and "materializ[ing] the noble idea of immortalizing the memory of the innocent victims of the Armenian Genocide."[31]. [37] In March and May 2020, Afeyan and Armenian president Armen Sarkissian discussed the COVID-19 pandemic. When fast-moving biotech platform companies fueled by private capital go public, they often run headlong into this brick wall of bias, effectively discouraging this more impactful form of innovation and the diversified product portfolios that result. Noubar Afeyan, Moderna co-founder, supports and encourages MIT students to seize opportunities in Armenia . life sciences innovation firm Flagship Pioneering. He is also co-founder and board member of the National Competitiveness Foundation of Armenia, a private-public partnership to promote economic development in the former Soviet Republic of Armenia. If I had thought about it a lot, I am very sure I would not have started a company. As Flagship has expanded, Afeyan has recruited a bevvy of high-powered executives to help out, both as partners of the firm and as CEOs of the new startups. We have a history of emerging from major global crises with new global paradigms, and new institutions to support them. The firm files intellectual property claims (most ideas generate multiple patent applications) to stake out its turf and invests $1 million or $2 million max. Between 2000 and 2005 the firm produced an average of two companies a year. Part of it is an innate comfort with discomfort and with not thinking that everything has to be just so.. [8][9] He became a U.S. citizen in 2008. 07:31 - Source: CNN Stories worth watching 16 videos On GPS: Moderna CEO on. Born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1962 to Armenian parents, he and his family fled the Lebanese Civil War to move to Montreal in 1975. In the opposite direction, we have only scratched the surface in terms of leveraging biology to advance AI research. In 2013, the company formed a partnership with AstraZeneca to develop treatments for cardiovascular, metabolic, and renal . On the one hand, 2021 was an extraordinary year for life science investment, with several chart-topping raises by early-stage companies. Noubar Afeyan fully understood those risks when he co-founded Moderna in 2010. Reflects change since 5 pm ET of prior trading day. Dr. Noubar Afeyan is Founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering, a unique enterprise that systematically makes breakthrough, life-science innovations, which improve human health and sustainability. Everybody loves Moderna, but [platforms] tend to be something that is in fashion or out of fashion. A.I. During the Armenian genocide of 1915-16, in which as many as 1.2 million Armenian. Between 2011 and 2017, Moderna raised $2 billion in venture capital funding.. His grandfather escaped to Bulgaria, where his father was born. But thats the way Noubar thinks, and he has stuck with it the whole time.. A recent article in Boston Business Journal listed the top 10 biotech investment rounds in the Boston area in 2021: the average raised was $397 million. Weve always believed that multiproduct bioplatform companies are most likely to create exponential potential. and Ph.D. from the Ben Gurion University in Israel before coming to the United States for post-doctoral research at the National Institutes of Health, as well as clinical training in internal medicine at Temple University Hospital. We now know what is possible when regulatory authorities operate with urgency and balance societal risk with societal benefit. In July, Ring raised $117 million, bringing in T. Rowe Price among other investors. Similarly, we have now directly experienced the devastating collision of the fast pandemic of COVID-19 with the slow pandemics of chronic disease. Noubar is a Senior Lecturer at MIT's Sloan School of Management where he has taught courses on Updated. But already, at this stage, we can see the ways in which the pandemic has revealed the future of biotechnology, an industry I have contributed to and watched evolve over the past 35 years. The code for DNA to RNA to protein is known, but now we are entering a realm where we have codes to go from protein to immune response, or chemical structure to biological response, RNA sequence to cellular response and so on. When referring to the manufacturing process of the new crown vaccine, Dr. Noubar Afeyan explained that starting from receiving the public sequence of the coronavirus SARS-CoV2 sequence, and then cooperating with NIH to enter the optimized sequence for human trials in the next few days, a large-scale first sequence will be carried out 44 days later. Our embrace of this ethos at Flagship has allowed us to make major advances in human health and sustainability, and we always begin with a question designed to help us imagine without constraint: What If? If you're an immigrant, then you're used to being out of your comfort zone. Minimum Fortune To Make the Cut Reaches A Record-Breaking $2.9 Billion And The Collective Net Worth Of The 2021 List Makers Surges To A Historic $4.5 Trillion #Forbes400 NEW YORK October 5, 20201 Forbes today released its 40th annual Forbes 400 list, the definitive ranking of the wealthiest p Shares of the Massachusetts-based biotech firm have risen by nearly 29% over the past month, pushing the net worth of the companys president, Stephen Hoge, to $1.1 billion. Dr. Noubar Afeyan was honored with the 2020 "Appeal of Conscience Award" for his leadership "in helping to heal our wounded world at the time of the pandemic," according to the award citation. What Now? Draw a circle around what currently exists, Afeyan says, and then draw a bigger circle around whats adjacent to that. In the world of computation, programming means giving a computer a set of instructions to conduct a set of calculations or tasks, yielding a very predictable and expected result. Reflecting on his career trajectory, he realized that being an immigrant has had a significant influence on his path. And what if, he asked a decade ago, messenger RNA (mRNA) could be the basis of therapeutics? Jobs at Flagship Pioneering and our Companies. Welcome to the era of Programmable Medicines. The lengthy and very resource-intensive regulatory approval process to bring drugs or diagnostics to market has been a gating factor, along with the costly and often specialized process of then manufacturing these products at scale once approved. Moderna, the first company to ship a vaccine for testing against the novel coronavirus, was founded by an immigrant. If the idea proves out in the lab, Flagship gives the new company a name and commits $20 million or more to it as a wholly owned subsidiary. the program accessible to all Dreamers even as we work with Congress to make these long-time members of our American family US citizens. [16] Afeyan has authored numerous scientific publications[17] and patents. Americans are fortunate Noubar Afeyan immigrated to the United States, and that the individuals who formed most of the leadership team at Moderna followed him to America. He's also the chairman and cofounder of biotech firm Moderna, known for its Covid-19 vaccine which was authorized by the U.S. FDA in December 2020. He also leads the firm's VentureLabs unit that invents and launches transformative startups. Why Are Moderna Insiders Selling So Many Shares? MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) has received a three-year gift from the Afeyan Family Foundation to support student and faculty collaborations between MIT and Armenia. Founded in 2000, Flagship is an enterprise where entrepreneurially-minded scientists invent seemingly unreasonable solutions to challenges If you see an error in this story, contact us. The record shows immigrants and immigrant-led companies created the vaccines. In 2020, Afeyan was recognized as one of four immigrants leading the efforts to find a vaccine for COVID-19. If you use a windshield cover, you can at least forget about scrapping the ice off your windshield to save some time and hassle. In early 2020, Moderna was tapped by the Trump administration to fast-track a COVID-19 vaccine. This past April, for example, Ohana Biosciences, a fertility company that focused on sperm-based treatments, shut its doors and laid off most of its staff a little over a year after emerging from stealth. Even today he remains chairman of Moderna and is on the board of six other companies in the Flagship circle. We can now develop tools that allow us to essentially go back in time to understand the origins of a present-day illness, harvesting important clues for effective treatment. Theres also a structure to how Flagships researchers consider dozens of ideas, accepting some and rejecting others. He was not from the country. Contrast this with the drug discovery paradigm weve relied on to date, which has produced important and occasionally transformative new therapies for patients, but it is ultimately a game of chance. Afeyan is of Armenian heritage and was born in Beirut, Lebanon. Noubar Afeyan is the Lebanese-Armenian chairman of Moderna Therapeutics, a company whose COVID-19 vaccine has shown a 94% effectiveness in advanced stages of research. Every one of our companies is born to aspire to what Moderna has done, he told Forbes during an interview at Flagships offices overlooking the Charles River. Flagship filed 341 patent applications in 2020, more than double the number it had filed two years earlier; in the first half of this year, it cranked out 379 patent applications. Flagship Pioneering Founder & CEO Noubar Afeyan, Ph.D, reflects on some of the forces shaping biotech, the areas ripe for bold leaps, and the lessons to carry forward as we continue to grapple with the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic. [12][13], Afeyan has authored numerous scientific papers. He is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. But public market performance doesnt tell the whole story of the hunt for value in biotech, or even the most interesting part. What Now? At Flagship Pioneering, which he founded in 2000, Noubar has created an enterprise . day. What do I mean by that? Speaking with KTLA about the latest developments at Moderna, Afeyan highlighted how his journey as an immigrant has impacted his work. As its assets have grown the pace at which Flagship has founded startups has accelerated. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one. Noubar Afeyan was born on July 25, 1962, in Beirut, Lebanon in an Armenian family. Afeyan says his goal is simply to help people, and he credited his drive and passion for philanthropy to his immigrant mentality. All we are doing is running an evolutionary process, he says. The shares were sold at an average price of $173.17, for a total value of $1,731,700.00. BY Jenna Schnuer. In 2022, Afeyan was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science, honoris causa (D.Sc.) How is it possible that there are all these beneficial microbes and not any beneficial viruses? Afeyan asks. What keeps you from innovating is being comfortable. He is an American Canadian According to the official Flagship Pioneering website, Noubar Afeyan is of American-Canadian citizenship, but he wasn't born in either of these countries. On the other hand, the story in public markets was quite different, and 2021 was largely considered a rout for biotech: a cooling off from the coronavirus-led enthusiasm that fueled the sectors stocks in 2020. Ill leave you with a few ideas. [1][3][2] His grandfather survived the Armenian genocide. By 2020, Flagship had more than doubled the pace to average of five startups a year. While we are known primarily for our work in human health at Flagship, our life science companies such as Indigo, Cibo, Inari, and Invaio, pioneer new solutions to sustainable agriculture, carbon capture, and farmer-focused carbon markets. What is our reliance on reason, on safe thinking, or adjacent discovery, suppressing? Probablemente Noubar Afeyan no sea muy conocido fuera de los crculos de emprendedores e inversionistas, pero durante el ltimo ao una de. 1. Noubars genius was not trying to force the issue in my brain, but to make me think that it could change the world and that it was worth the risk, he says. That feeling of restarting turns out, is very similar to what you need to have a startup of a company or to innovate.. Noubar Afeyan (Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for 100 LIVES) Noubar Afeyan was born to Armenian parents in Lebanon. It has been called Dr. Seuss Day because of this. However, the rise of communism prompted the family to leave. fast-tracks health care innovations, says Moderna's chairman. Early detection also offers an opportunity to radically change peoples relationship with their own health by empowering them to control their own health future with the information and the tools to preempt disease and reverse or manage a predisease condition. From 2007 to 2010, he also served on Boston Universitys Board of Overseers. The Germans took pity on them, he says. Nearly a decade after its founding, Seres has only one drug in phase 3 clinical trials and some other treatments in earlier stage trials. His family moved to Montreal, Canada in 1976. Noubar Afeyan is founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering. He's also the chairman and cofounder of biotech firm Moderna, known for its Covid-19 vaccine which was authorized by the U.S. FDA in December 2020. Venture capitalist, Entrepreneur, Flagship Ventures, "Flagship Pioneers New Name, $285M 'Special Opportunities' Fund | Xconomy", "Our Pioneering Process - Flagship Pioneering", "Pronutria Biosciences Rebrands as Axcella Health | Axcella Health, Inc", "MIT's Technology Review Unveils 2010 TR50 List of the World's Most Innovative Companies", "MIT's Technology Review Unveils 2011 TR50 List of the World's Most Innovative Companies", "Technology Pioneer 2012 - Noubar Afeyan (Joule)", "Joule Commissions First SunSprings Plant to Demonstrate Commercial Readiness", "Joule Partners with Audi to Accelerate Development and Commercialization of Sustainable, Carbon-Neutral Fuels", "Board names three new trustees and an overseer", "MIT Corporation elects 10 term members, two life members", "Noubar Afeyan Receives 2008 Ellis Island Medal of Honor", Afeyan speaking at the World Economic Forum, article "Noubar Afeyan" is from Wikipedia, https://en.everybodywiki.com/index.php?title=Noubar_Afeyan&oldid=939478. Ruben Karlenovich Vardanyan (Armenian: , Russian: ; born 25 May 1968) is an Armenian and Artsakhi politician who served as the State Minister of Artsakh, an unrecognized state in the South Caucasus, from 4 November 2022 until 23 February 2023. We are now a major step closer to delivering on the promise of transformative mRNA science to bring breakthrough medicines to patients across a vast array of diseases, including infectious diseases, rare diseases, cancer and cardiovascular diseases, among others.. Noubar Afeyan (Western Armenian: ; born in 1962) is an American-Canadian entrepreneur, inventor, and philanthropist. Here, he outlines his startup process. Flagship has shut down four companies in which it invested $10 million or more, as well as 13 early-stage startups in which it had invested less than that amount. Today, Afeyan is the cofounder and chairman of Moderna, . With the new capital, Flagship is ramping up its investments in therapeutics, agriculture and nutrition. Thats where we stand, were very excited.. For its rankings, Forbes estimated the fortune of Afeyan, the Moderna chairman, to be nearly $5 billion. Starting one successful company is a fine achievement. There is one enemy thats the virus.. [5] Flagship Pioneering focuses on creating and investing in first-in-category, high-value life science companies in three principal business sectors: therapeutics, health technologies and sustainability. He serves on the board of Ameriabank, a leading bank in Armenia. "[2] According to the company website, Flagship Pioneering has "fostered the development of more than 100 scientific ventures resulting in $30 billion in aggregate value, thousands of patents and patent applications, and more than 50 drugs in clinical development. In 2000, he started Flagship Pioneering to create and fund startups in health care and sustainability. Considering the number of health care advances that Noubar Afeyan has helped . There were 95 cases of infection among patients who received placebo in the companys 30,000-patient study. The news comes exactly a week afterresultsfrom Pfizer and BioNTech, which announced broadly similar results. Preemptive medicine can prevent or delay the onset of disease using new and emerging tools to detect pathways toward disease and interrupt those pathways, helping us individually and collectively to be more resilient in the face of infectious disease. You cannot procrastinate over the particular move. The best of these subsidiaries will eventually take on outside investors before (hopefully) going public. An RNA vaccine essentially turns your body into its own vaccine manufacturing unit., In late April, Moderna requested permission from the Food and Drug Administration to move to a second phase of testing. Turning biological problems into digital problems holds tremendous promise, as Flagship companies Valo, Repertoire and others powerfully demonstrate. [38][39], During the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, Afeyan wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Times in which he called for the US to step in and stop the war. Noubar Afeyan, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, inventor, technologist, and CEO was born to Lebanese-Armenian parents in Lebanon. His family moved to Montreal, Canada in 1976. Since launch, Moderna has raised venture funding in excess of $1B. Noubar Afeyan (born July 25, 1962), is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, inventor, technologist, and CEO. He received the Golden Door Award in 2017 from the International Institute of New England in recognition of his contribution to the US as a foreign-born American. Whats outside that is where people think it is reckless to work, he says. Noubar Afeyan, the founder of entrepreneurial investment firm Flagship Pioneering, watches from the sidelines of an event at his alma mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in May. How will these learnings shape regulatory approaches going forward? The companies said they will file for an emergency use authorization with the Food and Drug Administration in the coming weeks, and will file with other global regulators. I was literally mesmerized. Afeyan says, I started to learn everything I could about how to start companies., If you play parallel chess, you have got to get to the essence. As of November 2021, his net worth is estimated at $3.3 billion. Years later, as the Communist regime took over Bulgaria, the Afeyans moved again, escaping to Greece before settling in Lebanon in the early-1950s. Noubar Afeyan is the Founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering. Noubar has dedicated his career to improving the human condition by systematically creating science-based innovations that serve as the foundation for startup companies. November 9, 2021, 8:30 AM PST. While we read official numbers like 5.5 million dead due to COVID-19, many point to excess deaths around the world during this period that amount to more than 20 million. Afeyan studied chemical engineering at McGill University and later received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When the immune system sees these fragments, it learns how to attack them. One of the only unfortunate advantages Armenians have had by having gone through a genocide and having spread around the world is that we do have an experience of escaping and of immigrating and of constantly restarting, he said. Noubar Afeyan, Co-Founder and Chairman of Moderna and Founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering, champions proactive thinking and creating the right environment for new idea generation to innovate in leaps and bounds. Thanks to its mRNA Covid vaccine, Moderna now is a household name, with 12-month revenues north of $11 billion and a market cap approaching $100 billion. [9], In 2021, Afeyan announced that Moderna would not enforce its patent rights against anyone using those patents to make Covid-19 vaccines. Noubar Afeyan, an Armenian immigrant born in Lebanon, is one of the most successful biotech entrepreneurs at work. Many founders become serial entrepreneurs, starting companies and moving on, sometimes in rapid succession. Noubar Afeyan (Western Armenian: ; born in 1962) is an American-Canadian entrepreneur, inventor, and philanthropist. Perhaps a second question for all of us in and beyond biotech to take into 2022 is: What Now? The vaccine, known as mRNA-1273, was co-developed by the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based biotechnology company Moderna, Inc., and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health. Flagship's team of scientists poses scientific hypotheses, works to finesse them, and conducts proof-of-concept experiments that eventually lead to new scientific IP and companies with disruptive potential. Indigo Agriculture was founded in 2013 to use microbes to make seeds more productive. The building blocks of these biological modalities can be arranged rationally to achieve the desired effects in the human body. [10], Besides English, Afeyan speaks Western Armenian. Packard, who died in 1996, described himself as a new breed of engineer, a blend of entrepreneur and innovator. My answer no, it wasnt surprising is short on dramatic reveal, but inevitable in the era of programmable medicines. [15][27] As a member of its board, he met with Armenian Prime Minister Tigran Sargsyan in 2009[28] and 2012. Lord Ara Darzi, the leader of our Preemptive Health and Health Security Initiative, explains in this piece written with Flagships Tom Kibasi:New tools are being developed that will enable individuals to manage their own health by providing them with AI-enabled applications to assess their health status and determine if preemptive medicine interventions may be beneficial to avoid progression to a chronic disease. In the case of the Moderna vaccine, we long knew that the spike protein on the coronavirus played a critical role in its ability to enter and infect cells. Afeyan, an Armenian entrepreneur who was born in Lebanon and left the country with his family during its civil war, credits his background as an immigrant in his success and encourages others to . Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated. Afeyan is a member of the board of UWC Dilijan International School in Armenia, founded by Vardanyan in 2014. Noubar Afeyan explained in an interview that the promise of messenger RNA. Noubar Afeyan, an Armenian immigrant from Lebanon and grandson of a genocide survivor, is leading some of the breakthrough U.S. COVID-19 vaccine efforts as co-founder and chairman of Moderna. Moderna has clearly super-powered those returns. I had hoped to pen this Annual Letter in the wake of the pandemic to share my thoughts on what the crisis has revealed about societal preparedness generally, and about the biotech industry specifically. The vaccine is part of Modernas evolution to a clinical stage company. I have often asked why we expect extraordinary breakthroughs from reasonable people doing reasonable things. We also knew from the years of work we had done at Moderna that we could encode the protein sequence of virtually any antigen from programmed mRNA and elicit an immune response against that protein. Afeyan views immigrants and entrepreneurs as natural complements. They said, How can anyone give you money? The vaccine was developed two days after [publication of the coronaviruss genomic] sequence. While CEO of PerSeptive, Afeyan co-founded and funded numerous other biotechnology companies, including: ChemGenics Pharmaceuticals, acquired by Millennium Pharmaceuticals in 1997; Exact Sciences (NASDAQ:EXAS), Agenus (NASDAQ:AGEN); and Color Kinetics, acquired by Philips 2007. This note therefore begins en media res Noubar Afeyan . The answer, to me, is the big scientific breakthroughs that come from bold scientific leaps. After. Flagship is a venture capital firm with a total of $17 billion in assets that operates more like an incubator. Unlike a flu shot, which contains fragments of the influenza virus so your immune system can learn to attack them, an RNA vaccine gives your body the genetic code needed to produce viral fragments on its own. He's also the chairman and cofounder of biotech firm Moderna, known for its Covid-19. The Moderna vaccine is given in two doses, 28 days apart. But as Afeyan, an Armenian immigrant by way of Lebanon and Canada, turned on the charm Bancel, who was then CEO of French diagnostics maker BioMrieux, relented and agreed to come to Moderna. He started . And that reckless zone is Afeyans sweet spot because thats where the big breakthroughs will happen. Since the advent of modern medicine we have focused more on treating the symptoms we can see and measure than on addressing the underlying disease. Noubar Afeyan (born July 25, 1962), is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, inventor, technologist, and CEO. [16][17], Afeyan started his first biotechnology company in 1987, just a few days before Black Monday, and founded or co-founded five more companies within ten years. In June, Flagship raised $3.4 billion for a new fund, a giant pool of money even at a time when investment has been flowing to biotechnology and therapeutics. The Moderna and PfizermRNA vaccines, if approved, will become the first licensed products using an approach that has been thought to hold enormous promise as a tool for responding to new disease threats. That mindset of parallel entrepreneurship to me was a provocation.. In 2000, Afeyan founded Flagship Pioneering to create and fund early-stage start-ups addressing unmet needs in healthcare and sustainability. But Afeyan wondered if he could create a structure to start multiple companies at one time, always having multiple early-stage ideas and potential startups percolating in the labs. In 2013 to use microbes to make seeds more productive - Source CNN. Served on Boston Universitys board of Ameriabank, a blend of entrepreneur innovator! Is being comfortable, he says keeps you from innovating is being comfortable, he a! Reckless zone is Afeyans sweet spot because thats where the big scientific that! 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