Advancing Treatments for Orphan and Rare Diseases with Selecta Biosciences

Rare and orphan diseases affect hundreds of thousands of Americans, and many treatments cause unwanted immune responses.

What if you could mitigate unwanted immune responses and amplify the efficacy of therapies?

This is exactly what Selecta Biosciences aims to do in collaboration with Ginkgo. Together, we plan to design novel and improved enzymes with transformative and therapeutic potential to advance treatments for select orphan and rare diseases. This partnership leverages the unique platforms of both companies: Selecta’s clinically-validated ImmTOR™ platform, which is developing tolerogenic therapies, and Ginkgo’s horizontal platform for cell programming.

Under the terms of the collaboration, 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 $85M in cash, as well as further downstream value in the form of royalties on sales.

“We are excited to partner with Ginkgo and 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, PhD, CEO at 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. We look forward to expanding our pipeline and ultimately delivering on our shared mission to improve the lives of patients in need.”

Ginkgo works with a growing list of industry leaders that are addressing outstanding medical challenges with diverse therapeutic modalities, and we are thrilled to partner with Selecta in an effort to discover, engineer, and develop next generation therapeutic enzymes. We're excited to support Selecta in its mission to improve the quality of life for patients with unmet medical needs by expediting and maximizing Selecta’s capabilities.

Read the full press release here.

Posted by Ankit Saxena

---