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Private investment in biotech dwarfs what the US puts in right now.

US gov't (NIH) = $41.6B (not all is for biotech) Biggest pharma (PhRMA members) R&D = $83B VC biotech funding + follow-on rounds = $62B

So private funding is ~3.5x what the gov't spends today.

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The Gov't is often the earliest and most risk tolerant investor. I'm mainly thinking of DARPA (who funded Moderna to the tune of $25M if my memory serves) here, I have much less knowledge of how risk tolerant NIH is.

As the article points out, Modern was spending 500M a year on research before becoming profitable. Do you think a one time payment of 25M from DARPA was in any way relevant to their success?

If it happened at the very beginning when they had exactly $0 then yes it would be highly relevant. (I am not at all familiar with how Moderna got started)

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