Noubar Afeyan raised $3.4 billion for a new fund

Flagship Pioneering, the investor behind Covid-19 vaccine maker Moderna, said that it had raised $3.4 billion for a new fund, Forbes.com reported.

“The fund is a giant one even at a time when investment has been flowing into biotechnology and therapeutics”, the article reads.

Flagship founder Noubar Afeyan, who is worth $2.9 billion, has helped start more than 50 public and private healthcare and life sciences companies over the course of his career. “This will fund the next generation of bio-platforms that come out of our labs,” Afeyan told Forbes. “The experience of the past year has certainly suggested that science and technology can play a very big role in going after any number of diseases.”

“We will likely create some 20 to 25 new companies during the lifecycle of this capital pool during the next two and a-half to three years,” Afeyan says.

With the new capital, the fund intends to invest in therapeutics, agriculture and nutrition. It is also building a new division that will focus on preemptive medicine and health security in order to better protect people’s health before they get sick and to better prepare for future threats of infectious diseases.