On January 12, 2017 Moderna, with US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funding, began Phase I clinical trials of mRNA-1325 (a Zika vaccine) and was cleared to begin trials of mRNA-1388 (a Chikungunya vaccine). [1]
The following month, DARPA launched the “Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3) program, aimed at developing that foundational work into an entire system capable of halting the spread of any viral disease outbreak before it can escalate to pandemic status.” This stated intention of end-to-end vaccine platform, or medical countermeasure, is aimed to stop Pandemic X from taking hold, which appears other defense agencies, the Medical Counter Measures Consortium bought into the idea. [2]
“P3 focuses on rapid discovery, characterization, production, testing, and delivery of efficacious DNA- and RNA-encoded medical countermeasures, a foundational technology pioneered by DARPA under the ADEPT program”
““DARPA’s goal is to create a technology platform that can place a protective treatment into health providers’ hands within 60 days of a pathogen being identified, and have that treatment induce protection in patients within three days of administration.” DARPA believe that these nucleic-acid-based platform apporach for limiting the spread of infection, and would not “integrate into an individual’s genome” and the protein that the bodies cells are forced to make (in this case an antibody not antigen) would only last for “weeks to months“.