Under the risk-sharing agreement, PPD will assist Moderna in its clinical development efforts, including support for investigational new drug strategic planning, as well as for clinical trial design and implementation.
PPD will play an important role in advancing Moderna’s pipeline as it plans to accelerate its clinical efforts in the coming years.
Moderna’s pipeline includes several novel drug modalities, each having a different application of the company’s core expression mRNA platform for encode proteins that achieve a therapeutic benefit.
The company’s current modalities include infectious disease vaccines, personalized cancer vaccines, intracellular/transmembrane liver proteins, intratumoral cancer therapy, and secreted antibodies as well as proteins.
Moderna Therapeutics CEO Stéphane Bancel said: "We are building a high-quality, scalable clinical development capability to match the accelerated output of our mRNA research, which will require the ability to test many mRNA therapeutics in clinical trials in parallel each year.
"PPD is an ideal partner for Moderna because of its proven track record of quality and delivery at every phase of clinical development."
PPD chairman and CEO David Simmons said: "We look forward to applying our deep capabilities and expertise in the emerging biopharma space to help Moderna progress its pipeline through the clinic with the ultimate goal of delivering novel drugs to address unmet medical needs."