DARPA Awards Moderna a Grant for Up to $25M to Develop mRNA Therapeutics (2013)

https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-details/darpa-awards-moderna-therapeutics-grant-25-million-develop

by 1915cb1f • 5 years ago

268 66 5 years ago

investors.modernatx.com

jonplackett4• 5 years ago

Well that was money well spent!

scotty793• 5 years ago

I wonder what's the story behind BioNTech/Pfizer

They created equivalent vaccine.

mytailorisrich• 5 years ago

I see that BioNTech was founded in 2008. Moderna was founded in 2010.

I guess that like many advances, mRNA was (and still is) a new, promising technology that prompted people to found companies to bring it to the market. Moderna, as an American company, probably simply went to see DARPA when they were looking for funding because of the potential of the technology.

vmception3• 5 years ago

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
make antibody-producing drugs to protect against a wide range of known and unknown emerging infectious diseases and engineered biological threats

This is amazing. I need to follow their other grants now to see what they’re looking at

FredPret• 5 years ago

These folks invented the internet!

carom• 5 years ago

Enjoy!

https://www.darpa.mil/work-with-us/opportunities

app4soft2• 5 years ago

COMPUTATIONAL CULTURAL UNDERSTANDING (CCU)

This![0]

[0] https://beta.sam.gov/opp/a6d0788057414e2c8fd6bdf45e3fd21d/vi...

[PDF¹] https://www.darpa.mil/attachments/CCUProposersDayFAQ%20v15.p...

[PDF²] https://www.darpa.mil/attachments/CCUProposersDayBriefv7.pdf

[PDF³] https://www.darpa.mil/attachments/HR001121S0024-Amendment-01...

systemvoltage2• 5 years ago

Has anyone here gone through this process? What is it like compared to YC?

rasz• 5 years ago

DARPA also funded HackRF development, afaik still cheapest SDR with TX capability.

tooltalk2• 5 years ago

Why is this "amazing"? My understanding is that DARPA is just one of many investors and customers who approached Moderna to develope medicine for different uses. The company had raised $2B by the time they went IPO in 2018. It doesn't seem like DARPA funding had much to do with their COVID development, in the same way that Trump's Warp Speed didn't necessarily play a groundbreaking role in the vaccine development. In Pfizer's case, they refused any gov't funding, but only agreed to the gov't's guaranteed sales if their vaccined got approved.

subsubzero• 5 years ago

I have to totally disagree with this statement:

in the same way that Trump's Warp Speed didn't necessarily play a groundbreaking role in the vaccine development

Operation warp speed, despite its Trump affiliation was extremely successful, If it hadn't been in place the US would have been similar to Canada or Europe in terms of Vaccine rollout. Here's an article about OWS: https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-operation-warp-speed-worked...

Egidius• 5 years ago

This is why tax avoidance is a bad thing. Governments can accelerate innovation with stimulations like this.

markkanof• 5 years ago

Looks like DARPA's budget is about 3.5 billion a year vs. the overall defense budget of something like 715 billion. I'm betting that a lot more people would feel ok about paying taxes if more of it was going towards these types of projects rather than empire building in far away parts of the world.

1cvmask• 5 years ago

The defense budget is in fact over 1.25 trillion dollars in real terms. We just don’t count it like most other countries. For example nuclear weapons are under the Department of Energy.

https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2019/05/making-sense-of-the-1-...

https://tomdispatch.com/hartung-and-smithberger-a-dollar-by-...

gnulinux• 5 years ago

Right, so we need both. Defund the military, make sure rich people still pay their fair amount of taxes, and use that money to invest in science, education, healthcare, education etc.

demadog• 5 years ago

The U.S. isn't empire building. It's mainly a policy of retaining superpower status for world peace.

Containment of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea is largely the defining policy of the last 70 years.

Of course tons of blunders like Vietnam and Afghanistan. Tragedies. But there has not been a World War III nor have there been large scale wars killing a sizable portion of the populace such as most wars pre-WWII.

For further evidence that the U.S. isn't interested in empire building is the fact that in wars over the last 70 years, the U.S. hasn't gained land and tried to turn the countries into vassal states like in classical European wars or like USSR did. The U.S. aims to build allies not an empire.

systemvoltage2• 5 years ago

Defense is business in an abstract sense. DaaS is desirable for many nations instead of building domestic capability which would be far worse due to scale/reinventing-the-wheel. Look up US defense treaties with various nations across the world - this is a mutual agreement in exchange for IP, defense sales, assurance and guarantees, soft power, etc.

vmception3• 5 years ago

US government would never balance its budget even if tax compliance was 100% and the tax rate was 100%.

The math does not check out and the taxes fund nothing except the interest payments on international debt.

The things that were going to get funded will still get funded, because they are funded by the debt issuance and the continued market tolerance for US government debt issuances.

So, no, tax avoidance has practically nothing to do with this. The "roads and schools [and innovations]" argument is particularly weak, because whatever wasn't funded was never going to get funded. The only limit to budget allocations is the market tolerance of the debt and currency. So again - since that market tolerance is extremely vast and expansive given the lack of liquid alternatives - if it wasn't funded, it wasn't going to get funded.

JumpCrisscross2• 5 years ago

only limit to budget allocations is the market tolerance of the debt and currency

Sovereign debt buyers and FX traders strongly consider a states' ability to collect taxes.

hencq• 5 years ago

This is exactly the argument made by Mariana Mazzucato in The Entrepreneurial State. It argues that the state is a major driver of innovation. DARPA is a great example of that. It argues that governments should be receiving some of the returns that private companies make because of this innovation. E.g. Apple makes enormous amounts of money selling iPhones that is full of technology like GPS, Internet, etc. that wouldn't be possible without the state as a driver of innovation. It seems fair that they get a share of those earnings in return.

golergka• 5 years ago

Tax avoidance is a moral responsibility, because violence or threat of violence is morally wrong regardless of the outcome.

paxys• 5 years ago

$25 million went to research that produced a life-saving vaccine and averted (or at least abated) a global crisis. Meanwhile the F-35 program at a lifetime cost of $1.7 trillion has produced basically nothing.

People's biggest criticism of taxation is all the government corruption and wastage that it enables, and IMO that is completely valid.

jti107• 5 years ago

its kinda impressive all the technologies DARPA/DOD has funded...would be interesting to see the fail/win rate for them.

lrem• 5 years ago

Non-zero is all you need in this case, isn't it? :)

jonplackett4• 5 years ago

I wonder if it’s possible to calculate a rate of return on that.

How much worse off would we be now without mRNA vaccines?

I doubt anyone would be complaining about blood clots.

mempko3• 5 years ago

A big myth often told in the tech world that things are developed by startups using private equity. We often forget the large and dynamic public sector. Biggest "VC" in the world is DARPA and other US government entities.

EDIT: I meant to say, it's a big myth the tech industry tells the public.

ardit33• 5 years ago

It is not a myth, but well known. Startups take something that is already researched, and further develop it and commercialize/monetize it.

I think the myth might be more in the layman/general population, but most people in the tech world know this.

mempko3• 5 years ago

Yes! I guess I should be more precise thanks. It's a myth the tech world propagates to the general public. Updated my original comment.

refurb3• 5 years ago

You have numbers for the govt being the biggest? I mean, for biotech, total VC funding is larger than the entire NIH budget.

spamizbad• 5 years ago

One of the best $25,000,000 we've ever spent.

phh• 5 years ago

That's definitely pretty cool, and I really wish that European's funding had a track record anywhere close to DARPA (though I don't really complain, Europe funding isn't too bad)

Does someone have information about the size of Moderna back then? TFA says they had 144 patents, so I guess they were already pretty big?

ElDji• 5 years ago

So why are we paying 10 times the production price since this product has been payed by public funds ?

madcows• 5 years ago

Probably better if the money isn't that tainted...

mempko3• 5 years ago

Read, Debt the First 5000 years by David Graeber. Which outlines what markets are really about. Markets are a tool for the government to provision itself. The government creates markets. The myth that markets were created because barter was annoying is plain wrong.

gregshap• 5 years ago

Grants encourage early R&D, Purchasing Commitments encourage Product Development and Capital Investments. We can do more of both.

solarkraft2• 5 years ago

DARPA is an impressive VC. Could it make sense to apply their approach to other areas?

davesque• 5 years ago

It's a grant though. I assume no strings attached like a VC.

solarkraft2• 5 years ago

Good point, it’s a very abstract comparison. Could it make sense for them to receive equity in return? I suppose it would lead to preference of own companies versus others that may be ahead even without a grant.

Either way: Damn, money well spent. This one success may have justified all the other “failures” or gains that haven’t materialized yet.

justinzollars• 5 years ago

Well that 25M really paid off. Huge.

InTheArena• 5 years ago

THE US government at 66 million pounds was also the single biggest investor in research that led to the Astra-Zeneca/Oxford vaccine as well.

They also paid for the US supply chain, and a non-trivial part of the European supply chain as part of OWS.

It’s not a mistake that the successful vaccines where heavily internationalized affairs with a lot of research money, then a lot of infrastructure spending.

DARPA Awards Moderna a Grant for Up to $25M to Develop mRNA Therapeutics (2013)

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