Flagship Pioneering is an American life sciences

venture capital Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing provided by firms or funds to start-up company, startup, early-stage, and emerging companies, that have been deemed to have high growth potential or that have demonstrated high growth in ...

company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts that invests in

biotechnology Biotechnology is a multidisciplinary field that involves the integration of natural sciences and Engineering Science, engineering sciences in order to achieve the application of organisms and parts thereof for products and services. Specialists ...

life sciences This list of life sciences comprises the branches of science that involve the scientific study of life – such as microorganisms, plants, and animals including human beings. This science is one of the two major branches of natural science, ...

, health and sustainability companies. Portfolio companies include

Moderna Moderna, Inc. ( ) is an American pharmaceutical and biotechnology company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that focuses on RNA therapeutics, primarily mRNA vaccines. These vaccines use a copy of a molecule called messenger RNA (mRNA) to carry inst ...

, Indigo Agriculture, Inari Agriculture and Novomer. The firm both funds and incubates companies.

History

The company was founded in Cambridge in 1999 by

Noubar Afeyan Noubar Afeyan (Western ; born in 1962) is an American-Canadian entrepreneur, inventor, and philanthropist. He is best known for co-founding the biotechnology company Moderna, through his venture capital firm, Flagship Pioneering, and for co-foun ...

and Ed Kania under the name NewcoGen (short for "new company generation"), but later changed its name to Flagship Ventures, and again in 2016 to Flagship Pioneering. Several of the initial partners and executives had previously been with the venture capital firm Morgan Holland. In late 2010, Flagship formed

, which focuses on

drug discovery In the fields of medicine, biotechnology, and pharmacology, drug discovery is the process by which new candidate medications are discovered. Historically, drugs were discovered by identifying the active ingredient from traditional remedies or ...

drug development Drug development is the process of bringing a new pharmaceutical drug to the market once a lead compound has been identified through the process of drug discovery. It includes preclinical research on microorganisms and animals, filing for regu ...

, and

vaccine A vaccine is a biological Dosage form, preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious disease, infectious or cancer, malignant disease. The safety and effectiveness of vaccines has been widely studied and verifi ...

technologies based exclusively on

messenger RNA In molecular biology, messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) is a single-stranded molecule of RNA that corresponds to the genetic sequence of a gene, and is read by a ribosome in the process of synthesizing a protein. mRNA is created during the ...

(mRNA) technology, and which is famous for its

COVID-19 vaccine A COVID19 vaccine is a vaccine intended to provide acquired immunity against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that causes coronavirus disease 2019 ( COVID19). Knowledge about the structure and fun ...

. In 2013, Flagship helped fund the creation of Editas Medicine to use

CRISPR gene editing CRISPR gene editing (; pronounced like "crisper"; an abbreviation for "clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats") is a genetic engineering technique in molecular biology by which the genomes of living organisms may be modified. ...

for the development of pharmacological therapies, originally based on the genetic engineering protein

Cas9 Cas9 (CRISPR associated protein 9, formerly called Cas5, Csn1, or Csx12) is a 160 dalton (unit), kilodalton protein which plays a vital role in the immunological defense of certain bacteria against DNA viruses and plasmids, and is heavily utili ...

. Editas was founded by

Feng Zhang Feng Zhang (; born October 22, 1981) is a Chinese-born American biochemist. Zhang currently holds the James and Patricia Poitras Professorship in Neuroscience at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and in the Departments of Brain and Co ...

Jennifer Doudna Jennifer Anne Doudna (; born February 19, 1964) is an American biochemist who has pioneered work in CRISPR gene editing, and made other fundamental contributions in biochemistry and genetics. She received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, wit ...

, George Church, J. Keith Joung, and David R. Liu. Doudna would later win the

Nobel Prize in Chemistry The Nobel Prize in Chemistry () is awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to scientists in the various fields of chemistry. It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Alfred Nobel in 1895, awarded for outst ...

in 2020 for her work on CRISPR, but quit Editas in 2014 over legal differences over intellectual property.

References

External links

At Flagship Pioneering, the brazen venture capital firm that bankrolled Moderna, there’s a tolerance for failure but not for weakness
('' Stat'', February 2021) {{US-private-equity-company-stub Venture capital firms of the United States American companies established in 1999 Companies based in Cambridge, Massachusetts

History

See also

References

External links