Belgian mRNA technologies firm Etherna, which is backed by high profile investors including former Bayer CEO Marijn Dekkers and Moderna co-founder Kenneth Chien, has reoriented its business model. Interim CEO Bernard Sagaert tells In Vivo how the firm hopes to deliver superior products for partners in the rapidly expanding RNA space.

During Q3, biopharma merger and acquisition value reached $15.4bn and drew in $37.6bn in potential deal value from alliances. Device company M&A values reached $550m, while in vitro diagnostic firms and research tools players completed M&A activity that totaled $1.9bn.

Private Company Edition: Westlake Village BioPartners’ latest launch 3T Biosciences also licensed a second TCR platform from Stanford University. In other recent financings, Senda raised a $123m series C round, Orna revealed a $221m series B and CPRIT funded several cancer drug developers.

In the second part of In Vivo's series on mRNA manufacturing, we look at the technology behind the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines. Experts in the field are working on a variety of improvements that will enable quicker, cheaper, surer development and production of what could turn out to be a wide array of vaccines and therapeutics to be churned out by emerging mRNA platforms.