Moderna Therapeutics will create history
What you are going to read in the subsequent paragraphs is not just a news about just another Biotech company but will go down in the history of Biotech companies as One of Success & Mega IPO ever achieved ( if that happens ). Moderna Therapeutics is doing it in style.
Before we jump off to the latest, Let’s know a little about the 2 Billion dollar giant Moderna Therapeutics which is a biotechnology company that is focused on drug discovery and drug development based on messenger RNA
Moderna Therapeutics was founded in 2010 and the title was originally written “ModeRNA”. It was founded by Derrick Rossi in Harvard, whose lab developed a way of modifying mRNA, transfecting into human cells, and dedifferentiating them into stem cells, and then causing them to differentiate into desired cell types.
In 2017 Science published a report describing Moderna’s novel platform, which was the result of many months of discussions with Moderna Therapeutics staff. Moderna Therapeutics had made the significant decision to reveal some of its tactics in an attempt to break the rumor mills into which it was getting locked. The Science bit revealed that Moderna Therapeutics was
providing some of its mRNA therapeutic candidates in liposomes, that they had been using altered uridine nucleosides based on work done by Katalin Karikó on avoiding immune responses to mRNA drugs, that the company was using mRNAs with modified sequences to enhance folding and translation efficacy, and that their mRNA drug candidates were modified on each end, outside the coding region, to target them to specific cell typesNow the news:
Two months after unconfirmed news emerged that Moderna Therapeutics was prepping what could be biotech’s biggest IPO, the company has come through, filing on Friday to raise $500 million.
Moderna Therapeutics has increased round after private round, including a $500 million series G in February, which brought its total fundraising north of $2 billion. Soon after, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based firm grabbed another $125 million in preferred equity since it enlarged a cancer vaccine venture with Merck.
In its SEC filing, Moderna Therapeutics was vague in the way that it would use its IPO proceeds. They will go toward “drug discovery and clinical development, further expansion of our production platform and infrastructure and capabilities to support our pipeline.”
It will also use the funds to support “the further development of our mRNA technology platform and the creation of new modalities.” So far, the business has developed six “modalities”–prophylactic vaccines, cancer vaccines, intratumoral immuno-oncology, localized regenerative therapeutics, systemic secreted therapeutics and systemic intracellular therapeutics.
The business switched up its R&D version from a venture-based one to a”therapeutic area R&D version” in September 2017, bringing four individual units back under one umbrella. Now, it has 21 assets in its own pipeline, spanning infectious diseases, immuno-oncology, and rare diseases. Ten of those candidates are in clinical trials. The pipeline is led by the AstraZeneca-partnered AZD8601, a VEGF-A medication that’s in phase 2 for heart failure.
To ramp up its clinical applications, the company started a 200,000-square-foot production unit in Norwood, Massachusetts, in July. The website will supply material for its clinical trials applications at an estimated cost of $110 million, with the capacity to expand further after Moderna Therapeutics nears the commercialization stage.
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