RARE Daily

Selecta and Ginkgo Bioworks Partner to Advance Treatments for Orphan and Rare Diseases

October 26, 2021

Selecta Biosciences and Ginkgo Bioworks have partnered to design novel and improved enzymes with transformative therapeutic potential to advance enzymatic treatments for orphan and rare diseases.

Photo: Carsten Brunn, president and CEO of Selecta Biosciences

The partnership leverages Gingko’s cell programming platform and Selecta’s immune tolerance platform ImmTOR that selectively mitigates unwanted immune responses. Selecta has several proprietary and partnered programs in its pipeline focused on enzyme therapies, gene therapies, and autoimmune diseases.

“We expect that our ImmTOR technology, in combination with Ginkgo’s high throughput enzyme discovery, design, and screening capabilities will bring us one step closer to improving the sustained efficacy of novel biologic therapeutics,” said Carsten Brunn, president and CEO of Selecta Biosciences. “Further, this collaboration builds on extensive preclinical as well as strong clinical data from Selecta’s phase 2 COMPARE trial for the treatment of chronic refractory gout that further supports ImmTOR’s potential for sustained therapeutic benefit when combined with immunogenic enzymatic therapies.”

Under the terms of the collaboration, Selecta gains rights to develop and commercialize select therapeutic enzymes from Ginkgo’s advanced organism engineering platform to treat select auto-immune diseases. Ginkgo is eligible to earn upfront research and development fees and milestones, including certain milestone payments in the form of Selecta common stock, clinical and commercial milestone payments of up to $85 million in cash, as well as further downstream value in the form of royalties on sales.

Author: Rare Daily Staff

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