Scribe Therapeutics and Sanofi have formed a strategic alliance to help move the development of clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-based cell therapies for cancer treatments.
As per the agreement, Scribe’s CRISPR genome editing technology will be used to ease the genetic alteration of novel natural killer (NK) cell treatments for cancer. Furthermore, Sanofi will pay an amount of $25 million as an initial payment. If development and commercial deadlines are met, then Sanofi will pay an additional payment of $1 billion to Scribe. According to the volume of net sales, Sanofi will have to pay Scribe royalties for the technology being used by them and the company will obtain non-exclusive rights to Scribe’s CRISPR by Design platform.
Scribe is a US-based company in Alameda, which was founded by Nobel prize winner Jennifer Doudna. Scribe Therapies is a biotech business that creates and engineers innovative CRISPR-based therapeutics for which it has also developed a genetic modification platform which is working on multiple therapeutic areas such as:
· Ophthalmological diseases
· Metabolic Disorder
· Neurodegenerative diseases.
This platform promises to solve issues including safety, delivery, and poor editing results.
Sanofi is a Paris based French pharmaceutical company with a global reach. Although the company creates over-the-counter medications, they are primarily involved in the production, marketing, and R&D of pharmaceutical products. The company has its key focus in the following areas:
· Cancer Vaccines
· Diabetes
· Internal Medicine
· Cardiovascular
Sanofi’s growing NK cell treatments pipeline will be supported by Scribe’s CasX-Editors. These are a set of genome editing and delivery technologies based on the Casx enzyme. One of Sanofi’s pipeline drugs is, SAR445419, which is an NK cell treatment sample being developed for acute myeloid leukemia and is now being studied in a Phase I trial. Sanofi added the candidate to its pipeline in 2020 when it paid €309 million to buy Kiadis Pharma.
In August, the business signed a strategic partnership with Atomwise to uncover and investigate up to five drug candidates computationally using the latter’s AtomNet platform.
Sanofi Research Chief scientific officer Frank Nestle stated:
“Sanofi has been a lifesaver to millions of people across the globe in form of treatments and vaccines. This relationship with Scribe rewards our extensive research efforts throughout the NK cell treatment spectrum and provides our scientists with unique access to modified CRISPR-based technologies as they try to develop off-the-shelf NK cell therapies and innovative methods. The company is working at wider scales to ensure the development of innovative medications based on natural killer cells which might be useful in the treatment of blood cancer and tumors.”
Benjamin Oakes, CEO of Scribe stated:
“We’re fortunate to offer Sanofi access to our patented and upgraded gene editing technologies for use in ex vivo oncology applications which is different from our current pipeline”.
