As it moves to position itself beyond pandemic stardom, Moderna is spidering out into a number of biotech spheres — working on an Ebola vaccine, looking into the next iteration of cancer cell therapies and spending on an antibody discovery partnership.

In its latest move, Moderna is adding another antibody discovery collaboration — this time with Harbour BioMed through its new subsidiary Nona Biosciences, it announced Friday. Harbour sports a platform that specifically develops heavy chain-only antibodies, which it says are half the size of traditional antibodies.

Moderna will get to use Harbour’s platform on undisclosed cancer targets, from which it could develop “nucleic acid based immunotherapies,” presumably mRNA therapies. Moderna will pay a small upfront of $6 million, and with all downstream milestones added up, the deal could be worth up to $500 million.

Harbour’s founder and CEO Jingsong Wang, the former R&D chief for Sanofi in China, told Endpoints News that the deal came as Harbour was looking at “newer frontiers” for its heavy chain antibody platform, including developing antibody drug conjugates and next-gen CAR therapies, among others. Wang said that the smaller size of Harbour’s heavy chain-only antibodies make them “ideal for packaging and delivery expressed by mRNA systems.”

“So we had mutual discussions with some of the mRNA companies — the leader in this pack clearly is Moderna,” Wang said.

The deal is reminiscent of one Moderna inked with another antibody platform company, AbCellera, last September. Few details were released on that partnership, except that it was for six undisclosed targets for which Moderna could build mRNA-encoded antibodies. The science behind Moderna’s antibody deals still goes back to its roots — mRNA. After said antibodies are discovered, via AbCellera or Harbour, the plan would be to make mRNA that can encode for the antibodies, essentially turning the patient into the antibody manufacturer.

AbCellera, like Moderna, cemented its name in the pandemic. AbCellera’s antibody platform was behind Covid-19 antibody bebtelovimab, on which it partnered with Eli Lilly. In September, AbCellera broke ground on a new 380,000-square-foot campus in Vancouver.

On the flipside, Harbour worked with AbbVie on an experimental Covid-19 antibody in a research alliance that also included Netherlands’ Utrecht University. Harbour is headquartered in Shanghai, but also has offices in the Netherlands and Massachusetts. Nona, named for the Roman goddess of pregnancy and ‘spinner of fate’ who was called upon to help mothers give birth, is Harbour’s new subsidiary dedicated solely to technology licenses. In Wang’s words, Nona is “designated to enable others, to make others succeed.”

In the Harbour deal, Moderna also has the option to license the platform on additional targets.

Harbour’s platform also churned out a bispecific antibody that AstraZeneca picked up in exchange for $25 million upfront.

This story was updated with comment from Jingsong Wang.