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Replay Launches with $55 Million to Reprogram Biology by Writing and Delivering Big DNA

July 25, 2022

Replay, a genome writing company reprogramming biology by writing and delivering big DNA, launched with $55 million in seed financing.

Photo: Adrian Woolfson, executive chairman, president, and co-founder of Replay

KKR and OMX Ventures led the financing with additional participation from ARTIS Ventures and Lansdowne Partners, SALT, DeciBio Ventures, and Axial.

Adrian Woolfson, former head of Research and Development at Sangamo Therapeutics, Lachlan MacKinnon, a member of the founding team at Oxford Science Enterprises, David Knipe, a world-renowned virologist and pioneer of HSV research, and Ron Weiss, a pioneer of synthetic biology and professor of Biological Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology founded Replay.

The company’s portfolio of next-generation genomic medicine technologies aims to solve the key challenges currently limiting clinical progress, including the need for increased payload capacity and off-the-shelf cell therapies that substantially reduce cost of goods, improve production speed, volume, and consistency, and expand the potential for genome engineering.

Replay’s genomic medicine toolkit encompasses a portfolio of disruptive platform technologies to write and deliver big DNA, including a high payload capacity HSV delivery platform, synHSV, a hypoimmunogenic cell therapy platform, uCell, and a proprietary genome writing platform, DropSynth.

SynHSV facilitates the delivery of large genes, genomic genes, multiple genes, and multiple transcriptional activators and repressors, thereby extending the reach of genomic medicine and opening up the possibility of polygenic therapy. uCell is a universal, renewable, off-the-shelf, genomically rewritten, hypoimmunogenic iPSC-derived cell source for regenerative medicine and cell therapy. DropSynth is a genome writing platform enabling low-cost synthesis of libraries of synthetic genes and big DNA.

Replay’s corporate structure separates technology development from therapeutic product development within disease area-specific product companies. To date, Replay has established four synHSV gene therapy product companies, aimed at bringing big DNA therapies to monogenic diseases affecting the skin, eye, brain and muscle, and an enzyme writing product company using LASR algorithm and DropSynth to optimize enzyme functionality.

“Genomic medicine has the potential to transform the future of clinical therapeutics. Over my three decades of experience working in clinical medicine, academia, and the biopharmaceutical industry, it has become clear that we require a more robust and comprehensive toolkit of molecular genetic platform technologies to solve biology’s most complex problems and realize its full therapeutic potential,” said Adrian Woolfson, executive chairman, president, and co-founder of Replay. “In Replay we have assembled a world-class team of entrepreneurs, subject matter experts, and cutting-edge genomic medicine and synthetic biology technologies into a coherent structure that will enable us to address medicine’s greatest challenges, including solid tumors and polygenic diseases.”

Author: Rare Daily Staff

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