With a renewed focus on bringing sustainable biopesticides and a coronavirus vaccine to market, GreenLight Biosciences, the rapidly growing agtech and life sciences firm based in Medford, has brought in a whopping $102 million in Series D funding.
The round, which was oversubscribed, was led by Chinese investment firm Morningside Ventures. S2G Ventures, Coromorant Asset Management, Continental Grain Company, Fall Line Capital, Tao Capital Partners, Baird Venture Partners, MLS Capital Fund II, Lewis and Clark AgriFood and Lupa Systems also participated.
“GreenLight Biosciences’ manufacturing technology can address critical pain points for RNA supply in both agriculture and human health,” Jason Dinges of Morningside Ventures said in a press release. “RNA-based products represent an opportunity for innovation in both human therapeutics as well as safe, environmentally friendly crop protection, and we are excited to partner with GreenLight’s expert team to deliver them at scale to patients and farmers alike.”
GreenLight'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. But the basis of that technology—targeting pests using RNA, thereby leaving the environment around them undisturbed—can also apply to life sciences.
GreenLight is currently developing a large-scale vaccine platform targeting seasonal and pandemic influenza, as well as rapid response to emerging viruses. The startup has several coronavirus vaccine candidates in the works, all mRNA-based, meaning they work by carrying instructions such that injected cells themselves produce the target antigen, simulating a viral infection and stimulating immune responses against the pathogen.
It's an approach that a number of Massachusetts companies are using. The most prominent of those firms is Moderna Therapeutics, the Cambridge-based startup that just last week announced it planned to enroll 30,000 people in the U.S. in an expedited Phase 3 trial of its mRNA-based coronavirus vaccine. Another is CureVac, a highly sought-after Covid-19 drug company based in Germany with a U.S. headquarters in Boston; the German government just spent close to $340 million to acquire a 23 percent stake in the company.
It's a crowded playing field. But GreenLight's mRNA vaccine production platform is designed to scale the development of not only GreenLight's own vaccines, but "nearly any other mRNA vaccine candidate as well," a spokesman told BostInno last month, when GreenLight announced it had raised an oversubscribed $17 million special purpose funding round through a wholly-owned subsidiary called GreenLight Pandemic Response. "The company aims to manufacture at the scale needed for the most effective vaccine(s) to make it through clinical trials."
The Series D round is expected to accelerate GreenLight's efforts in both agtech and life sciences. GreenLight plans to file paperwork with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency later this year, which would enable a commercial launch of its biopesticide in 2022.
“GreenLight was born from a passion to make our world more sustainable and more equitable,” Andrey Zarur, GreenLight’s co-founder and CEO, said in the release. “We are honored to draw the support of this notable group of new and existing investors as we drive forward our dual mission to make food production more robust and environmentally respectful; and our health solutions applicable to every member of the human race."
