Business
Table 1:Current fund-raising efforts and pre-money valuations of Moderna Therapeutics DATE 12/06/2012 10/02/2013 11/20/2013 01/14/2014 01/05/2015 01/12/2016 08/24/2016 09/07/2016 02/01/2018 05/03/2018 ROUNDa Seed Grant Series A Series B Series C Grant Series D Grant Series E Series G INVESTORSb Flagship (+) DARPA Flagship (3) Alexion Assorted (6) B&M Gates Assorted BARDA Assorted (10) Merck
a These are arbitrary designations of each investment round b Lead investor where designated, and ( ) number of investors for the round c Valuation is based on pre-money estimates
2017 that it was shutting down all four sub- sidiaries and subsuming drug candidates back into the parent company9. Bancel explained that poten- tial new investors struggled to understand what they owned versus existing investors. He went on to explain that internally, because of this organisa- tional structure, R&D efforts were being duplicat- ed and the addition complexity had led to higher, and unnecessary expenditures. This reorganisation proved costly and left a continued concern that bringing everything back into parent Moderna, may “stretch the [company] too thin”9. Finally both, Bancel (CEO) and Hoge (President) provided an optimistic perspective by stating “the benefits of having everything under their control outweigh the risks of managing several separate subsidiaries”.
Unveiling the platform Moderna had, in four short years (2011-15), raised considerable investment funds (see Table 1) and some notoriety. The secrecy surrounding details of the platform and suggestions by former employees that the company had not published any data sup- porting its ability to produce mRNA therapeutics gave cause for concern. In particular, a comparison to the scandal-plagued, blood diagnostics company Theranos10 was inevitable, since unnerving paral- lels were becoming obvious. Moderna had shared almost no details in the peer-reviewed literature
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concerning its platform, and even the targets of drug candidates in Phase I clinical trials had not been revealed. Investors appeared to be operating on a blind faith basis as to the underlying value of the platform. In spite of high management and staff turnover, which had plagued the company, by 2015 Moderna had achieved ‘Unicorn Status’. Such status brought additional scrutiny and poten- tial skepticism as to whether promises made would be ultimately realised. Something clearly had to be done!
Moderna mRNA platform: In early 2017 Moderna disclosed its first drug candidates, which included vaccines for both flu and the Zika virus as well as treatment for heart failure, at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. It also agreed to provide unprecedented access to reporters from the journal Science to Moderna research facilities and details of the mRNA platform11. The Moderna scientific premise was elegantly simple, but profound. Introduce a specific, modified mRNA into a patient such that this single stranded molecule (drug) starts to produce proteins, utilis- ing human cells (in the patient) to produce a cor- responding protein. It has been compellingly argued that, “assembling these chemical instruc- tions could be a faster and more adaptable way to make drugs than manufacturing the individual
Drug Discovery World Fall 2018 AMOUNT $40 million $24.6 million $110 million $25 million $450 million $20 million $474 million $125 million $500 million $125 million $6.5 billion $7.5 billion $2.5 billion $2.6 billion VALUATIONc
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