National Post (National Edition)
The Canadian hockey dad behind COVID-19 vaccine
Derrick Rossi was at his vacation home overlooking Squam Lake, New Hampshire, on a recent afternoon, chatting away on FaceTime as the sun poured through the window behind him, a burst of radiant afternoon light not completely unbefitting the career of a Toronto-born and raised molecular biologist.
Rossi used to run his own lab at Harvard, but walked away from academia two years ago at age 52 to pursue other interests, for instance, reading more books that had nothing do with science, and hanging around hockey rinks in the greater Boston area as a hockey dad with three daughters, all with a serious passion for the game shared by their father, a diehard Toronto Maple Leafs man, married to an equally hockey-crazed Finn named Nina Korsisaari.
Several of Rossi’s colleagues tried to talk him out of leaving Harvard. They didn’t get it, or get him, exactly. What could possibly be more interesting, more important than being a professor at a world-renowned university?
“We humans, we are real worker bees, everybody has got a job, and they work and they work, and they have a family, and they want to provide as much as they can for their families, but if you step back and say, “Wait a minute, working is really hard, and so what if I didn’t have to work?” Rossi says. “I love science. I’ve done a lot of science, and I am going to keep reading about science, but it doesn’t define me.
“I can take it away, and not be a Harvard professor, and be totally cool with that.”
He could also totally afford to retire in his early 50s. After shifting away from the window overlooking the lake, Rossi, for the benefit of his caller from Toronto, helpfully thumbed through his phone to check Moderna’s share price. Moderna would be the biotech company he founded in 2010, and has no formal role with now, beyond owning a “significant” chunk of its shares, which were trading at US$20 in January and closed at US$80 on May 18, after news of the firm’s promising results in a phase 1 COVID-19 vaccine trial became public and created a stock frenzy and somewhat of a controversy over the timing of company information. (Moderna’s share price has since retreated to US$52).
Rossi characterizes the recent buzz around Moderna as “pretty cool,” but takes a holistic view of the clinical trial process: no matter how promising your phase 1 results may be, getting something to market and starting to save lives is a three-step process. Anxious as the world is for a vaccine, the world will need to wait and see.
Meantime, the retired professor is happy to discuss science, his hero is Charles Darwin, and hockey — Borje Salming, Lanny McDonald and Darryl Sittler are Rossi’s all-time favourite Leafs — and books, including Moby Dick, the Melville-tome he has read multiple times. Rossi’s mix of highbrow and lowbrow interests hint at his unusual life arc, from a blue-collar, Maltese immigrant household in northeast Toronto, to a white lab coat at Harvard, to founding a company whose initial valuation at public offering in 2018 was US$7.5-billion, a biotech record.
But about those Canadian roots: Rossi’s father, Fred, worked at an auto body shop. His Mom, Agnes, owned a piece of a Maltese bakery. Neither parent had more than a high school education. They came to Canada. They worked. They raised five kids. Derrick was the baby of the bunch and a super-keen student. He credits Lloyd Lumby’s science class at Dr. Norman Bethune High School in Scarborough with instilling his love of molecular biology.
“As soon as I learned about molecular biology that was it, I knew what I wanted to be,” Rossi says.
A couple of degrees from the University of Toronto followed, as did a stint in Helsinki, getting a doctorate and meeting his future wife. Stops in Texas and Stanford came next, before Rossi landed at Harvard in 2007.
“Science took me around the world,” he says. “I would not change a thing.”
What put Rossi, the scientist, on the map, and foretold of his future riches, was a discovery involving messenger ribonucleic acid, or mRNA. MRNA are carrier pigeons of sorts, loaded with genetic instructions. They are the briefcase with the blueprints every cell requires to become whatever it is destined to be. Rossi, using doctored mRNA, found that he could hack into the system and reprogram a cell, a breathtaking find he discovered while initially looking for something else. But that’s another story.
If you could reprogram a cell, bypassing a bad gene here, and a mutation there, you could, theoretically, treat a whole sea of serious genetic disorders: hemophilia, cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia and countless more. It was a moon shot of a find and it led to the creation of Moderna.
“The real important discovery here was you could now use mRNA, and if you got it into the cells, then you could get the mRNA to express any protein in the cells, and this was the big thing,” Rossi says.
Moderna’s founder, mind you, was never actually on the company payroll, but rather served on the board, and as a scientific adviser until cutting formal ties with the firm in 2014 because, well, Rossi had other stuff to do, like running a 12-person lab at Harvard and launching four subsequent biotech firms (Intellia Therapeutics, Magenta Therapeutics, Stelexis Therapeutics, Convelo Therapeutics).
Alas, the sum of all his endeavours kept interfering with what Rossi was really hankering to do, as his girls got older: be a doting hockey dad who reads books, but not always about science. Back at the lake, conversation shifts from the Leafs playoff chances to the Darwin lover’s potential legacy. Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine work relies upon Rossi’s initial discovery with mRNA. Now, much like the rest of us, he is watching for what happens next — Moderna is set to begin phase 2 trials — only with the view of a scientist who was there at the start.
“I can just imagine if someone I loved were sick, I’d be up day and night thinking, how could I possibly help them?” Rossi says. “And if mRNA medicine, one day, goes in and helps somebody who has a family member that is suffering, when that happens for the first time, then I’ll hang up my hat and say, ‘OK, that was a success.’ “