Moderna Therapeutics this week announced that it raised $450 million in what is the largest-ever single round of venture capital funding for a biotech startup. Fortune has learned that the deal valued Moderna at around $3 billion, and means that the Cambridge, Mass.-based company now has $800 million of cash in the bank (including unspent past investments).
Moderna Therapeutics上周宣布，该公司已经募集了4.5亿美元的投资，如此巨大的单轮筹资额堪称生物技术类初创公司之最。《财富》获悉，这笔交易将Moderna的估值确定为30亿美元左右，它也意味着，这家位于马萨诸塞州坎布里奇的公司目前拥有8亿美元的现金储备（包括过去投资中没有用完的部分）。
All venture capital investments in biotech are, by their nature, highly-speculative. Binary scientific risk married with quasi-capricious regulatory risk. You might presume, therefore, that Moderna had somewhat tamped down on those dangers in order to raise so much money at such a high price tag. But you’d be wrong. In fact, Moderna is further away from commercialization than are most companies worth far less, as it still does not have a single drug candidate in human clinical trials.
从本质上说，所有在生物技术领域的风险投资都颇具投机色彩。其中有一半是科学上的风险，另一半则是法规上的不确定性。因此，你也许会认为Moderna设法降低了这些风险，从而得到了如此高的估值，募得了如此多的资金。但你错了。实际上，Moderna的商业化程度还不如大部分估值远低于它的公司，而且在人类临床试验方面连一项候选药物都拿不出手。
So how to explain the massive fundraising success, particularly with hedge fund and mutual funds that typically don’t back such early-stage endeavors (particularly when its CEO explicitly says that an IPO is not on the horizon)?
那么要如何解释该公司在募集资金上取得的巨大成功，尤其是还得到了通常并不支持这种初期公司的避险基金和互惠基金的注资（特别是其首席执行官甚至还明确表示，该公司不会很快进行首次公开募股）？
The best I can do is to say that Moderna could be the single most revolutionary drug company to be formed in at least the past decade (or at least tied with Google-backed Calico, which wants to stop cellular aging). That statement comes drenched in all of the aforementioned risk caveats, but Moderna’s ambitions dwarf those of most any other company that is trying to treat Disease X. In other words, the promise proved just too tantalizing for many folks to pass up.
我能做出的最好解释是，Moderna可能是过去至少十年中诞生的唯一一家最具革命性的制药公司，或至少是与谷歌支持的Calico平分秋色，后者旨在延缓细胞老化。我之所以做出这样的论断，是因为尽管考虑到了所有上述风险，但Moderna的野心让其他任何想要治疗某种疾病的公司都相形见绌。换句话说，这一前景过于诱人，让许多人难以拒绝。
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