May 13, 2015
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Watertown, Mass.-based Selecta Biosciences, Inc. announced today that Paris-based Sanofi has exercised an exclusive licensing option, which makes the company eligible for up to $300 million for its celiac disease program.
In November 2012, Selecta closed a deal with Sanofi that was worth up to $900 million to develop therapies for life-threatening food allergies. Sanofi would gain access to Selecta’s Synthetic Vaccine Particle platform. It would also have the option to develop two more products.
Selecta was founded in 2008 by MIT bioengineer Robert Langer, along with Omid Farokhzad and Ulrich von Andrian, both of Harvard Medical School, to commercialize their work on polymer nanoparticles. The goal was to develop vaccines built out of nanoparticles.
“Sanofi and Selecta are working together to push toward the outer barriers of immunotherapy to deliver innovative solutions to patients,” said Kurt Stoeckli, vice president and Sanofi‘s head of Biotherapeutics, Research and Development in a statement. “This area is constantly evolving, and with partners like Selecta, breakthrough medicines may be within our reach.”
Selecta, under the new option, will receive research support and pre-clinical, clinical, regulatory and sales milestones that total $300 million. It will also receive double-digit tiered royalties if any commercial product is developed.
Selecta has several products in its pipeline and in various stages of development, as well as partnerships with Genethon, JDRF (formerly the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Skolkovo Innovation Center.
In addition to the Sanofi news, Selecta announced today an ongoing research collaboration with Genethon. The goal of this collaboration is to enable repeat dosing for gene therapies. The two companies believe that combining Genethon’s gene therapy vectors and Selecta’s Synthetic Vaccine Particle platform will be effective for three specific applications. The two companies will co-develop and co-own the gene therapies.
One of the problems with gene therapy to date is the patient’s immune system kicks in to neutralize the therapy after it’s delivered. This sometimes takes years. Selectra’s Synthetic Vaccine Particle is a way of potentially building gene therapy vectors from biodegradable polymer nanoparticles, hopefully neutralizing the body’s autoimmune reactions.
“Gene therapies that can be applied repeatedly would exponentially increase the number of highly beneficial applications of gene therapies including muscular dystrophies and pediatric liver metabolic diseases,” said Fulvio Mavillo, Genethon’s scientific director in a statement. “I’m excited by the tremendous potential of combining Genethon’s gene therapies with Selecta’s novel SVP platform.”
The initial collaboration will focus on gene therapies for muscular dystrophies and pediatric liver metabolic diseases that use adeno-associated virus (AAV) vectors.
The Sanofi-Selecta collaboration will focus on celiac disease. In this disease, the body reacts to fragments of the gluten protein, which is found in barley, wheat and rye. The body’s immune system then attacks the gut. They will be jumping into a crowded research field, with Alvine Pharmaceuticals and Alba Therapeutics workings on treatments, as well as ImmusanT, and Celimmune, which has licensed an older Amgen drug as a potential treatment for celiac disease.
Selecta did not respond to requests for an interview in time for this article’s deadline.
