The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense started on February 7, 1958, and created for the purposes of developing military technologies.
DARPA is responsible for creating, or at least helping to create many of the technologies people use today, including the internet and laptop.
Starting in 2020, DARPA aided the Moderna corporation in creating Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine. In relation to this, DARPA's ADEPT program was tasked with investigating nucleic acid vaccines in 2011. According to the DARPA website, "The hypothesis was that rather than delivering antigens to the immune system, we could deliver genes that encode the antigen and allow the human body to produce the antigen from its own cells, triggering a protective immune response." Moderna was one of the main partners for the Adept project and would later get FDA Emergency Authorization for RNA vaccines in December 2020.