Moderna Therapeutics上周宣布，该公司已经募集了4.5亿美元的投资，如此巨大的单轮筹资额堪称生物技术类初创公司之最。《财富》获悉，这笔交易将Moderna的估值确定为30亿美元左右，它也意味着，这家位于马萨诸塞州坎布里奇的公司目前拥有8亿美元的现金储备（包括过去投资中没有用完的部分）。

    从本质上说，所有在生物技术领域的风险投资都颇具投机色彩。其中有一半是科学上的风险，另一半则是法规上的不确定性。因此，你也许会认为Moderna设法降低了这些风险，从而得到了如此高的估值，募得了如此多的资金。但你错了。实际上，Moderna的商业化程度还不如大部分估值远低于它的公司，而且在人类临床试验方面连一项候选药物都拿不出手。

    那么要如何解释该公司在募集资金上取得的巨大成功，尤其是还得到了通常并不支持这种初期公司的避险基金和互惠基金的注资（特别是其首席执行官甚至还明确表示，该公司不会很快进行首次公开募股）？

    我能做出的最好解释是，Moderna可能是过去至少十年中诞生的唯一一家最具革命性的制药公司，或至少是与谷歌支持的Calico平分秋色，后者旨在延缓细胞老化。我之所以做出这样的论断，是因为尽管考虑到了所有上述风险，但Moderna的野心让其他任何想要治疗某种疾病的公司都相形见绌。换句话说，这一前景过于诱人，让许多人难以拒绝。

    Moderna的核心技术是帮助人们在他们自己的细胞内制造药物，而不是在实验室配置用于服用或注射的药物（这是所有其他生物技术公司的做法）。具体方法是，在病人体内植入信使RNA，这种信使RNA随后就会刺激人体细胞制造治疗所需的蛋白质。如此一来，病人就能自己痊愈了。同样重要的是，Moderna还宣称他们设计的信使RNA不会触发常见的人体免疫反应，后者曾导致过去在信使RNA上的努力都付之东流。

    这一点不仅使得许多疗法成为可能，还让Moderna的产品比传统药物的检验时间短得多，价格低得多。因为它可以利用普通的信使RNA制造设备和流程来生产应对各种病症的信使RNA，而不是为每种疾病准备单独的制造设备（这是当下的常用做法）。

    对投资者而言，这一切意味着他们只需要签一张支票，实际上就对制药公司做出了几十次甚至几百次投资。此外，这个平台得运转起来才行。但Moderna一旦得以运转，他们能够治疗的疾病几乎就没有限制，而该公司也无意约束自己的发展。Moderna如今已有45个活跃项目，有的是内部项目，有的则是与AstraZeneca和Alexion Pharmaceuticals等战略伙伴共同研发的，而且他们还计划上马更多项目（在得到这些新的投资后，公司有望将部分项目推进到临床试验的第二阶段）。

    Moderna还根据治疗领域的不同，把许多项目交给他们自己的准公司运营。这种做法使得Moderna看起来像是一个孵化器，而该公司的高管也不排除某些项目最终被剥离的可能性，剥离方式有可能是出售，甚至公开上市，而Moderna自身则作为核心技术提供商和制造商。实际上，某些产品理论上可以在Moderna之前完成首次公开募股。

    当然，投资者对此可不会抱怨。他们都能从中受益。（财富中文网）

    译者：严匡正

    审校：任文科

    Moderna Therapeutics this week announced that it raised $450 million in what is the largest-ever single round of venture capital funding for a biotech startup. Fortune has learned that the deal valued Moderna at around $3 billion, and means that the Cambridge, Mass.-based company now has $800 million of cash in the bank (including unspent past investments).

    All venture capital investments in biotech are, by their nature, highly-speculative. Binary scientific risk married with quasi-capricious regulatory risk. You might presume, therefore, that Moderna had somewhat tamped down on those dangers in order to raise so much money at such a high price tag. But you’d be wrong. In fact, Moderna is further away from commercialization than are most companies worth far less, as it still does not have a single drug candidate in human clinical trials.

    So how to explain the massive fundraising success, particularly with hedge fund and mutual funds that typically don’t back such early-stage endeavors (particularly when its CEO explicitly says that an IPO is not on the horizon)?

    The best I can do is to say that Moderna could be the single most revolutionary drug company to be formed in at least the past decade (or at least tied with Google-backed Calico, which wants to stop cellular aging). That statement comes drenched in all of the aforementioned risk caveats, but Moderna’s ambitions dwarf those of most any other company that is trying to treat Disease X. In other words, the promise proved just too tantalizing for many folks to pass up.

    Moderna’s core technology is designed to help people make medicines within their own cells, rather than create something in a lab which patients need to ingest or inject (i.e., the way all other biotech works). It does so by injecting messenger RNA into the body, and then that mRNA stimulates the person’s cells to create the needed therapeutic proteins. Patient, heal thyself. Equally important, Moderna claims that its mRNA design is able to evade the typical human immune response that has felled past mRNA efforts.

    Not only does this open up a massive number of therapeutic possibilities, but it also could make Moderna’s products significantly faster to test and cheaper to buy than are traditional drugs. Namely because it can use common mRNA manufacturing facilities and processes to create the mRNA that can be used for all sorts of indications, rather than having to create discrete ones for each new candidate (as is typically done today).

    For investors, all of this means that they are actually making dozens — if not hundreds — of pharma bets with a single check. Again, the platform needs to work. But, if it does, there are few limits to the number of ailments that Moderna could treat — and the company has no interest in limiting itself. It currently has 45 active programs both in-house and with strategic partners like AstraZeneca AZN 1.44% and Alexion Pharmaceuticals ALXN -2.20% , and has plans to launch plenty more (with the new money expected to get several of them into Phase II clinical trials).

    Moderna basically silos many of these programs into their own quasi-companies, based on therapeutic area. In that way it acts a bit like an incubator, and company executives leave open the possibility that certain programs could eventually be spun out via sales or even public offerings — with Moderna serving as the core technology provider and manufacturer. In fact, certain Moderna products could theoretically complete IPOs before Moderna does.

    Not that investors would complain, of course. They’d get a cut of all of it.