CAMBRIDGE, Mass., October 2, 2013—Moderna Therapeutics, the company pioneering messenger RNA therapeutics™, a revolutionary new treatment modality to enable the in vivo production of therapeutic proteins, announced today that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded the company up to $25 million to research and develop its messenger RNA therapeutics™ platform as a rapid and reliable way to make antibody-producing drugs to protect against a wide range of known and unknown emerging infectious diseases and engineered biological threats.Messenger RNA therapeutics™ can be designed to tap directly into the body’s natural processes to produce antibodies without exposing people to a weakened or inactivated virus or pathogen, as is the case with the vaccine approaches currently being tested. As a result, Moderna’s messenger RNA therapeutics™ platform has the potential to speed the development and manufacture of treatments that can produce a safer, more reliable and more robust immune response than existing technologies…