Flagship Pioneering awarded $47m contract for MCM development

Flagship Pioneering has been awarded a contract worth up to $47 million USDS over five years by the United States Department of War (DoW) under the ONTARGET programme for operationalising novel technologies for advanced rapid generation of effective medical countermeasures.

Rather than contracting for a single product, DoW will evaluate platform technologies from Flagship's ecosystem of more than 40 companies for their potential to speed up medical countermeasure development. The contract starts with a select set of projects and DoW can add more throughout the term. The award will be administered by Flagship Health Security Corporation, a new Flagship subsidiary created to handle government partnerships.

ONTARGET is managed by the Joint Science and Technology Office (JSTO) within DoW's Chemical and Biological Defense Program. It aims to keep pace with adaptive and engineered biological threats by improving countermeasure performance, shortening development timelines and strengthening response.

There will be five priority areas, including broad-spectrum countermeasures against emerging threats, precision delivery technologies to improve efficacy and reduce side effects, toxin-neutralising platforms, immune enhancement and viral pathway disruption and AI/ML for countermeasure discovery and development.

The award provides proof-of-concept funding for two initial projects:

• Apriori Bio will use its Octavia™ AI platform to generate one or more stable, cross-protective countermeasure candidates that hold up against viral variants.
• Prologue Medicines will use its DELVE platform to mine millions of viral proteins for functions that can modulate and enhance human immune responses.