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

[vmception]

> 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

[rasz]

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

[FredPret]

These folks invented the internet!

[carom]

Enjoy!

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

[tooltalk]

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.

[spamizbad]

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

[mempko]

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]

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.

[refurb]

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

[InTheArena]

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.

[jonplackett]

Well that was money well spent!

[scotty79]

I wonder what's the story behind BioNTech/Pfizer

They created equivalent vaccine.

[Egidius]

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

[markkanof]

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.

[vmception]

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.

[hencq]

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.

[paxys]

$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.

[golergka]

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

[jti107]

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

[lrem]

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

[solarkraft]

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

[davesque]

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

[justinzollars]

Well that 25M really paid off. Huge.

[phh]

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]

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

[gregshap]

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

[madcows]

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

[mempko]

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.