Chinook Partners with Ionis to Develop Antisense Therapy for Rare, Severe Chronic Kidney Disease

Rare Daily Staff

Chinook Therapeutics entered into a collaboration agreement with Ionis Pharmaceuticals for the discovery, development and commercialization of an antisense oligonucleotide therapy for a rare, severe chronic kidney disease with significant unmet medical need.

The companies will leverage Chinook’s precision medicine approach and deep expertise in nephrology and Ionis’ extensive expertise in RNA-targeted therapeutics.

Antisense therapies are designed to seek out, bind to, and destroy a mRNA in a highly specific manner, so that the amount of disease-causing protein is dramatically decreased. Antisense therapies can also treat diseases caused by too little protein by increasing the production of the protein, thereby restoring the protein to normal levels.

“Developing an ASO therapy enhances our ability to target key genetic and molecular drivers and expands our precision medicine pipeline for rare severe chronic kidney diseases while continuing to pursue our goal of making dialysis and transplant unnecessary for people living with kidney disease,” said Andrew King, chief scientific officer of Chinook.

Under the terms of the agreement, Chinook will pay Ionis an undisclosed upfront payment as well as potential development and regulatory milestone payments and royalties. Ionis will be responsible for IND-enabling toxicology studies and Chinook will be responsible for clinical development and commercialization.

Photo: Andrew King, chief scientific officer of Chinook