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Moderna Therapeutics and Charles River Laboratories Announce Strategic Collaboration to Scale Moderna’s Nonclinical Development Efforts for Novel mRNA Therapeutics
Partnership will support Moderna’s expanding pipeline and help accelerate discovery programs and development candidate progress into the clinic
“With ten programs in development across our internal efforts and
external collaborations, Moderna continues to generate development
candidates and discovery programs at an accelerated pace through our
unique mRNA therapeutics research engine. This strategic relationship
will help enable the scale, efficiency and speed needed to support the
full breadth of discovery programs underway and to continue advancing
our development candidates,” said Stéphane Bancel, Chief Executive
Officer of Moderna. “In particular, this collaboration will allow us to
accelerate GLP toxicology study timelines, which will be instrumental as
we continue to progress our development candidates into the clinic.
Charles River’s expertise across discovery and nonclinical development
activities, combined with their familiarity with our novel platform,
make them an excellent partner for Moderna. The ability to work with
Charles River in its
Moderna’s pipeline is composed of a series of novel drug modalities, each representing a distinct application of the company’s proprietary core expression mRNA platform to encode proteins that achieve a therapeutic benefit. Moderna’s current modalities include infectious disease vaccines, personalized cancer vaccines, rare disease-associated intracellular/transmembrane liver proteins, intratumoral cancer therapy, and secreted antibodies and proteins. Moderna is leveraging these modalities to advance drugs across a broad spectrum of therapeutic areas via its wholly owned ventures as well as a growing ecosystem of partners.
For nearly 70 years, Charles River has been in the business of providing
the research models required in research and development of new drugs,
devices and therapies. Over this time, the company has expanded upon its
core competency of in vivo biology to develop a diverse portfolio
of discovery and safety assessment services, both
“We are very pleased to enter into this strategic relationship with
Moderna,” said
About Moderna Therapeutics
Moderna is a clinical stage pioneer of messenger RNA Therapeutics™, an
entirely new in vivo drug technology that produces human
proteins, antibodies and novel protein constructs inside patient cells,
which are in turn secreted or active intracellularly. This breakthrough
platform addresses currently undruggable targets and offers a superior
alternative to existing drug modalities for a wide range of disease
conditions. Moderna is developing and plans to commercialize its
innovative mRNA drugs through its own ventures and through its strategic
relationships with established pharmaceutical and biotech companies. Its
current ventures are: Onkaido, focused on oncology, Valera, focused on
infectious diseases, Elpidera, focused on rare diseases, and Caperna,
focused on personalized cancer vaccines.
About Charles River
Charles River provides essential products and services to help pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, government agencies and leading academic institutions around the globe accelerate their research and drug development efforts. Our dedicated employees are focused on providing clients with exactly what they need to improve and expedite the discovery, early-stage development and safe manufacture of new therapies for the patients who need them. To learn more about our unique portfolio and breadth of services, visit www.criver.com.
View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160606005364/en/
Source:
Moderna Therapeutics
Investors:
Maren Winnick, 617-674-5297
maren.winnick@modernatx.com
or
Media:
Jess
Rowlands, 202-729-4089
jessica.rowlands@fkhealth.com
or
Charles
River Laboratories
Investors:
Susan E. Hardy, 781-222-6190
susan.hardy@crl.com
or
Media:
Amy
Cianciaruso, 781-222-6168
amy.cianciaruso@crl.com