Molecular Assemblies Achieves Key Milestones in DARPA NOW Project for On-Demand DNA Vaccine Manufacturing

Funding Rounds

▤ Summary

Molecular Assemblies awarded an additional $4 million to support further technology development in next phase of DARPA-funded project being led by GE HealthCares Technology and Innovation Center Molecular Assemblies Fully Enzymatic Synthesis enables synthesis of long, accurate oligos in picomole or femtomole scales, a fundamental capability for this program and for a variety of application needs Rapidly scalable and deployable mobile platform is being developed to increase speed at which new medical countermeasures could be deployed in response to a pandemicSAN DIEGO, Aug. 28, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- , ("MAI" or the "Company") a pioneer and leader in the field of enzymatic DNA synthesis, today announced the achievement of key milestones for therapeutic DNA target accuracy and technology automation for the project from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) called NOW (Nucleic Acids On-Demand Worldwide). ""Highly pure, accurate DNA will greatly improve the speed and development of DNA- and potentially RNA-based vaccines," said Phil Paik, Ph.D., Chief Technology Officer of Molecular Assemblies. "As we continue to advance our FES technology to longer lengths and faster turnaround times, we are setting new standards that expand the sequence design space and enable new therapeutic possibilities. "DARPAs NOW program, managed by Dr. Shannon Greene in the Biological Technologies Office, was created to develop a rapid, mobile medical manufacturing platform for producing, formulating, and packaging DNA vaccines and therapeutics for use in stabilization and humanitarian operations and to better prepare deployed field-forward forces against bio-threat attacks and emerging infectious diseases.Molecular Assemblies is part of the GE HealthCare-led DARPA NOW project, called RUN FAST (Rapid Universal Nucleic Acids using Fieldable Automated Synthesis Technology), which leverages the expertise of the GE HealthCare team to build automated systems in the biological production of medicines and therapies with a novel synthetic method for making DNA, and potentially RNA, to assemble a complete mobile medical manufacturing platform. For more on GE HealthCare, visit their website: https://www.gehealthcare.com/.Molecular Assemblies Fully Enzymatic Synthesis (FES) is the foundation of their approach to create long, high quality, sequence specific DNA composed of 400+ base pairs.

$ Funding

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Amount $4.0M Total raised
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Date August 28, 2024 Announcement date
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Investors MedicaLogic Lead investors
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Company http://www.molecularassemblies.com/ Funded company

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industries
HealthTech
applications
Business Planning / Continuity

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Healthcare Software Medical Devices Software Development

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