Flagship Pioneering is an American life sciences

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

company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts that invests in

biotechnology Biotechnology is the integration of natural sciences and engineering sciences in order to achieve the application of organisms, cells, parts thereof and molecular analogues for products and services. The term ''biotechnology'' was first used ...

, life sciences, 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 pro ...

, 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 hy, Նուպար Աֆէեան; 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, Flagshi ...

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. In late 2010, Flagship formed

, which focuses on drug discovery,

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 re ...

, and

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

technologies based exclusively on messenger RNA (mRNA) technology, and which is famous for its COVID-19 vaccine. In 2013, Flagship helped fund the creation of Editas Medicine to use

CRISPR gene editing CRISPR gene editing (pronounced "crisper") is a genetic engineering technique in molecular biology by which the genomes of living organisms may be modified. It is based on a simplified version of the bacterial CRISPR-Cas9 antiviral defense syst ...

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 kilodalton protein which plays a vital role in the immunological defense of certain bacteria against DNA viruses and plasmids, and is heavily utilized in genetic ...

. Editas was founded by

Feng Zhang Feng Zhang (; born October 22, 1981) is a Chinese-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 Cognitive ...

Jennifer Doudna Jennifer Anne Doudna (; born February 19, 1964) is an American biochemist who has done pioneering work in CRISPR gene editing, and made other fundamental contributions in biochemistry and genetics. Doudna was one of the first women to share a ...

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

Nobel Prize in Chemistry ) , image = Nobel Prize.png , alt = A golden medallion with an embossed image of a bearded man facing left in profile. To the left of the man is the text "ALFR•" then "NOBEL", and on the right, the text (smaller) "NAT•" then "M ...

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 STAT, Stat. , or stat may refer to: * Stat (system call), a Unix system call that returns file attributes of an inode * ''Stat'' (TV series), an American sitcom that aired in 1991 * Stat (website), a health-oriented news website * STAT protein, a ...

'', 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