Tagged: moderna
4 results
Flagship Pioneering
Flagship Pioneering is a Cambridge, Massachusetts life-sciences enterprise that invents, builds, and funds companies rather than merely investing in them. Founded in 1999 by Noubar Afeyan, the firm runs a systematic 'venture creation' engine - generating scientific hypotheses in-house, prototyping them in its own labs, and spinning validated concepts into independent operating companies in human health and sustainability. Its portfolio has produced more than 100 ventures, including Moderna, and it directs roughly $14 billion in capital.
Christian Cobaugh
Christian Cobaugh is a molecular biologist turned biotech operator who has spent more than 15 years at the frontier of genetic medicines. In January 2026 he became CEO of Alloy Genetic Medicines, the nucleic-acid division of Alloy Therapeutics, where he leads work on the AntiClastic cyclic nucleic acid platform for ASOs, siRNA, and other RNA therapeutics. He is best known for founding Vernal Biosciences, an mRNA contract manufacturer he built in Colchester, Vermont, on the premise that everyone who needs mRNA should be able to get it. Before Vernal he was the first scientist in the Alexion-Moderna mRNA partnership and held discovery, development, and manufacturing roles at Arcturus Therapeutics, CRISPR Therapeutics, Translate Bio, and Omega Therapeutics.
Jesse Chen
Jesse Chen is the founder, president and CEO of Fortitude Biomedicines, a Waltham, Massachusetts biopharmaceutical company that launched in January 2026 with $13 million in seed financing. A serial biotech entrepreneur with an MIT PhD in biological chemistry, Chen previously co-founded TRIANA Biomedicines and Avilar Therapeutics, was the founding scientific hire at Kymera Therapeutics where he built its targeted protein degradation platform, and held discovery roles at Moderna and Millennium Pharmaceuticals. At Fortitude he is betting that molecular glue payloads, packaged into a platform he calls GLUE-DAC, can overcome the drug resistance that limits today's antibody-drug conjugates and extend them into autoimmune disease.
Örn Almarsson
Örn Almarsson is the co-founder and CEO of Axelyf, an Icelandic-American biotech building next-generation lipid nanoparticles to deliver RNA medicines beyond the liver. Before Axelyf he ran the delivery sciences team at Moderna from 2013 to 2020, helping engineer the components behind the Spikevax COVID-19 vaccine, after earlier stints at Merck and Alkermes. A bioorganic chemist by training, he is the co-author of more than 70 publications and over 60 patents, and is now pairing a proprietary lipid library with a machine-learning model called ANNA to crack the hardest problem in RNA medicine: delivery.