Hello, everyone.
I'm Lloyd Minor, Dean of the Stanford School of Medicine,
and I am delighted to welcome you to the final session
of The Pandemic Puzzle: Lessons from COVID-19.
Over the past three months,
we've hosted discussions and debates
with the world's top leaders, scientists,
and experts in the fight against COVID-19.
We've examined the US and global response,
the pandemic's impact on health equity,
and the systems we need to mitigate future pandemics.
In so doing, we've unearthed no shortage
of challenges and areas for improvement.
But for today's session, we'd like to end on a hopeful note,
because the future of biomedicine has never looked brighter.
Drawing from decades of scientific research,
the COVID-19 vaccines were developed in record time
and have saved countless lives.
We've achieved what many thought was impossible.
How can we build on this watershed moment
and advance vaccines, treatments, and cures of tomorrow?
Thanks to you,
we have been able to communicate
some of the most important advances
that have occurred from the pandemic,
and that's what we're going to explore in today's program.
Before we dive in,
I would like to thank our teams at Stanford Medicine
and the Stanford Graduate School of Business
for their tremendous effort
in producing this symposium series.
We've reached thousands of attendees
from around the world thanks to the efforts of these teams,
and we've explored some of the toughest questions
about our post-pandemic future.
And I would be remiss not to thank
former Stanford University trustee
and long-time friend of Stanford, Brook Byers,
who has served as an advisor throughout this project.
Brook, we sincerely appreciate
all your support and guidance.
I'll now invite Jon Levin,
Dean of Stanford Graduate School of Business
and our symposium co-host, to say a few words, Jon?
Thank you, Lloyd,
and welcome everyone to the fourth episode
of the Pandemic Puzzle.
This is our fourth and final conversation today,
and I'm very much looking forward to it,
and just to reiterate what Lloyd said,
we spent much of the first opening conversations
talking about the challenges and vulnerabilities
that were revealed by the pandemic
and how we might prepare for the next one.
And today, we're gonna turn our attention
to some of the exciting innovation and opportunity
that was created by the pandemic,
and many of those opportunities,
whether they're in the area of vaccine development
or therapeutics or digital health are places
that will require a combination of pioneering science,
commercialization in business, government regulation,
and in some cases, incentives,
and academic enterprise and creativity, as well.
And so today's session fittingly is going to bring
together representatives from all those different sectors
to talk about different dimensions of innovation
and opportunity created by the pandemic
around biomedicine and its application.
And so with that, I'll turn it over to Lloyd,
who is going to kick off our first fireside chat
and before I do that,
I should say that during all of today's sessions,
there's an opportunity for us
to potentially take live questions.
You can send in your questions using the online chat box
that's at pandemicpuzzle.stanford.edu.
And with that, I'll turn it over to Lloyd
who's going to host the first fireside chat,
which is with acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock.