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Recently, the World Health Organization confirmed 120 new human cases of avian H7N9 influenza in China resulting in 37 deaths, highlighting the concern for a potential pandemic and the need for an effective, safe, and high-speed vaccine production platform. Production speed and scale of mRNA-based vaccines make them ideally suited to impede potential pandemic threats. Here we show that lipid nanoparticle (LNP)-formulated, modified mRNA vaccines, encoding hemagglutinin (HA) proteins of H10N8 (A/Jiangxi-Donghu/346/2013) or H7N9 (A/Anhui/1/2013), generated rapid and robust immune responses in mice, ferrets, and nonhuman primates, as measured by hemagglutination inhibition (HAI) and microneutralization (MN) assays. A single dose of H7N9 mRNA protected mice from a lethal challenge and reduced lung viral titers in ferrets. Interim results from a first-in-human, escalating-dose, phase 1 H10N8 study show very high seroconversion rates, demonstrating robust prophylactic immunity in humans. Adverse events (AEs) were mild or moderate with only a few severe and no serious events. These data show that LNP-formulated, modified mRNA vaccines can induce protective immunogenicity with acceptable tolerability profiles.

Entrepreneurs play a fundamental role in bringing new technologies to market. Because technologies are often configurable to serve a variety of different markets, it is possible for entrepreneurs to identify multiple market opportunities prior to the first market entry of their emerging firms, and if they elect to do so, to therefore have a choice of which market to enter first. The empirical results presented in this paper offer three new insights regarding this important early-stage choice in new firm creation. First, they reveal that serial entrepreneurs have learned through prior start-up experience to generate a "choice set" of alternative market opportunities before deciding which one to pursue in their new firm creation. Second, the analysis indicates that entrepreneurs who identify a "choice set" of market opportunities prior to first entry derive performance benefits by doing so. Third, the positive relationship between the number of market opportunities identified prior to first entry and new firm performance is nonlinear and subject to decreasing marginal return. The research literature has yet to acknowledge the notion of multiple opportunity identification prior to entry, and the related idea of selecting the most favorable market opportunity for the creation of a new technology firm.market opportunities, serial entrepreneurs, technological commercialization, new firm creation

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The choice of the firm's market environment is one of the fundamental decisions of firm founders. We study the pre-entry generation of founders' market choice sets by investigating their search for market opportunities in which the firm's technological resources, as embodied in a product or service, can be commercialized. Analyzing data collected through personal interviews with founders of 496 technology ventures, we find that founding teams with more diverse industry experience and more diverse external knowledge sourcing relationships identify not only a larger number of but, in particular, more varied (distant) market opportunities. However, the extent to which strategic variety of such opportunities is identified depends on the founders' technological expertise, whereas technological expertise is less relevant in identification of the number of opportunities. Furthermore, by showing that the extent and nature of the firm's pre-entry opportunity set has a significant effect on the likelihood of subsequent firm diversification, we document how initial constraints in founders' choice sets can have a lasting impact on the growth potential that the new firm exploits over time. We discuss the implications of our findings for the literatures on organizational learning and innovation, entrepreneurship, as well as the strategy literature examining firm growth, diversification, and value creation.