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

&gt; <i>Defense</i> Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)<p>&gt; make antibody-producing drugs to protect against a wide range of known and unknown emerging infectious diseases <i>and engineered biological threats</i><p>This is amazing. I need to follow their other grants now to see what they’re looking at

One of the best $25,000,000 we&#x27;ve ever spent.

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 &quot;VC&quot; in the world is DARPA and other US government entities.<p>EDIT: I meant to say, it&#x27;s a big myth the tech industry tells the public.

THE US government at 66 million pounds was also the single biggest investor in research that led to the Astra-Zeneca&#x2F;Oxford vaccine as well.<p>They also paid for the US supply chain, and a non-trivial part of the European supply chain as part of OWS.<p>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.

Well that was money well spent!

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

its kinda impressive all the technologies DARPA&#x2F;DOD has funded...would be interesting to see the fail&#x2F;win rate for them.

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

Well that 25M really paid off. Huge.

That&#x27;s definitely pretty cool, and I really wish that European&#x27;s funding had a track record anywhere close to DARPA (though I don&#x27;t really complain, Europe funding isn&#x27;t too bad)<p>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?

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