Moderna is the Biotech company that raised the biggest VC round ever ($450M) and which signs deals almost every week. It signed a $50M deal with Merck two weeks ago, and now signs a strategic partnership with prestigious Institut Pasteur from Paris through its new Venture Valera.
Moderna is developing a proprietary mRNA therapeutics platform. Instead of producing the drug to inject it into patients, it injects mRNA which penetrates into cells and will be expressed to produce the therapeutics locally. Moderna is frankly one of the most impressive Biotech company I have ever seen, during LaBiotech Tour Boston. Here is the entire interview:
This January, Moderna launched its new venture Valera which focuses on infectious diseases. At the same time as the launch, it announced a $50M partnership with Merck. The director of research form Merck Roger M. Perlmutter stated in Forbes “We had the opportunity to really get in under the hood. Moderna is a company that we’ve talked with and known for quite a long time. So we had the opportunity to look at them carefully and to look at the data that they’ve produced pre-clinically, and frankly, it’s enormously impressive.” I’ve been used to American exaggeration but not as excessive, the data they have must be very solid, as the one they published in Nature Biotechnology.
Now, Valera signed a strategic partnership agreement with Institut Pasteur, the prestigious French research institute founded by Louis Paster 125 years ago after his discovery of vaccination, microbial fermentation, and pasteurization. Institut Pasteur has extensive expertise in infectious diseases and it will collaboration with Valerna to work on pre-clinical and clinical programs based on Moderna’s RNAm technology. An entirely new way for Institut Pasteur to pursue their fight against infectious disease and a solid academic partnership for Moderna.
Now, I am just wondering when the next deal of Moderna will be announced.