Flagship Pioneering, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based life sciences venture creation firm that builds and backs biotechnology platform companies, has received a contract worth up to USD 47 million over five years from the US Department of War (DoW) under the Operationalizing Novel Technologies for Advanced Rapid Generation of Effective Medical Countermeasures (ONTARGET) program, administered by the Joint Science and Technology Office (JSTO) within the DoW's Chemical and Biological Defense Program. The award will be administered by Flagship Health Security Corporation, a subsidiary created specifically to facilitate government partnerships, and provides access to Flagship's ecosystem of more than 40 companies spanning translational science, platform engineering, drug development, enabling technologies, and AI/machine learning.
Initial work under the contract involves two Flagship-founded companies: Apriori Bio, applying its Octavia platform — a biology-enabled AI system for designing variant-resilient, broadly protective countermeasures — and Prologue Medicines, deploying its DELVE platform, which uses AI to mine viral protein sequences and identify immunomodulatory functions for immune enhancement and countermeasure development. Priority capability areas under ONTARGET include broad-spectrum countermeasures, precision delivery technologies, toxin-neutralizing platforms, novel immune enhancement approaches, and AI/machine learning integration for medical countermeasure (MCM) discovery.
The DoW retains the option to advance additional projects from across Flagship's portfolio throughout the five-year contract term. The contractual framework identifies initial projects at Apriori Bio and Prologue Medicines as the starting point for this collaboration.