GreenLight Biosciences is making a big pivot.
The Medford-based startup's flagship product is a pesticide alternative: an RNA-based product that targets harmful pests by modifying their gene expressions and weakening them through a natural process. Now, the company is taking that technology and delving into life sciences.
GreenLight announced plans Tuesday to build out its scalable mRNA production capability to target the production of billions of doses of Covid-19 vaccines. It's part of the company's larger expansion into life sciences, which includes efforts to develop a large-scale vaccine platform targeting seasonal and pandemic influenza, as well as rapid response to emerging viruses.
To finance those plans, GreenLight has raised an oversubscribed $17 million special purpose funding round from new and existing investors including Flu Lab, Xeraya Capital and Baird Capital.
The round was raised through GreenLight Pandemic Response, a wholly-owned subsidiary the company formed specifically to raise the special purpose round, a spokesman told BostInno. GreenLight Pandemic Response disclosed in a securities filing on April 9 that it was seeking $15 million; at the time, it had raised just under $9 million.
"GreenLight’s team and technology make them uniquely positioned to quickly bring large-scale, practical solutions to market for rapid pandemic response," Mike Liang, partner at Baird Capital, said in a statement. "GreenLight’s approach promises the billions of doses needed with significantly faster manufacturing times than other technology platforms."
In addition to the vaccine platform, GreenLight is developing several differentiated mRNA vaccine candidates against the coronavirus. It joins a crowded playing field. As our sister publication the Boston Business Journal reported last month, more than two dozen Massachusetts companies have announced plans to create vaccines, treatments or devices for Covid-19.
Among those is Cambridge-based Moderna Therapeutics, whose mRNA-focused vaccine, now in clinical trials, was recently singled out by U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci as reason for optimism.
As it happens, GreenLight could potentially scale the production of Moderna's vaccine candidate in addition to its own. The platform GreenLight is building will be open to virtually all mRNA vaccine candidates, not just the ones it is developing.
"GreenLight's manufacturing platform is designed to manufacture not only [its] own vaccine candidate but nearly any other mRNA vaccine candidate as well," the GreenLight spokesman said in an email to BostInno. "The company aims to manufacture at the scale needed for the most effective vaccine(s) to make it through clinical trials."
GreenLight's vaccine candidates will, like Moderna's, target mRNA. As the company explains it, mRNA vaccines carry instructions such that injected cells themselves produce the target antigen, simulating a viral infection and stimulating immune responses against the pathogen.
GreenLight did not give a timeline as to the completion of this work, but the spokesman said that work is underway now and "will continue into the foreseeable future."
Already, the company has prepared a set of Covid-19 vaccine candidates for laboratory and pre-clinical evaluation.
"An effective vaccine against Covid-19 is the only realistic means to stave off the spread of Covid-19 and enable a re-start of our global societies and economies. mRNA-based vaccines offer the best approach for a fast response," GreenLight CEO Andrey Zarur said in the statement. "It is our responsibility to rapidly establish our cGMP manufacturing process to enable broad production of Covid-19 mRNA vaccines."
