EmendoBio, which has developed a next-gen gene editing technology to cure chronic genetic diseases, has signed its first licensing agreement and taken its first-ever leap from the R&D phase to the commercial one. The company, founded in 2015, signed a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Swedish biotech company Anocca, which may use its technological gene editing platform to develop and manufacture drugs to treat solid tumors.
Under the agreement, Anocca, a privately owned Swedish company, can use EmendoBio’s latest OMNITM platform to accelerate the development and production of its deep pipeline of therapies for difficult-to-treat solid cancers.
EmendoBio is now part of the Japanese firm AnGes Inc. after its acquisition of EmendoBio for $250 million in cash in late 2020. Up to that point, EmendoBio had managed to raise $73 million, with a principal part of that investment made by AnGes itself. After the acquisition, AnGes invested an additional $150 million, demonstrating the Japanese firm’s faith in the Israeli company and its strong conviction in its ability to realize its potential.
“Integrating EmendoBio’s technology into our manufacturing process supports Anocca’s aim of generating the highest-quality cell therapy products. This next-generation gene editing system provides the precision and efficiency needed to scale out the production of our growing libraries of TCR-T products in a high-precision manufacturing process. We are excited to work with EmendoBio to develop gene-edited TCR-T cell therapies as we prepare for our first clinical program targeting the KRAS driver mutation in a hard-to-treat solid cancer,” said Anocca’s CEO and co-founder, Reagan Jarvis.
“This non-exclusive licensing agreement marks a significant milestone in the field of T-cell therapy,” said Dr. Ei Yamada, Director of EmendoBio. “Together with Anocca, we are embracing the shared vision of harnessing the potential of gene editing and cellular therapies to profoundly impact patient outcomes. Our combined expertise will unlock novel avenues for therapeutic development and push the boundaries of what’s possible in advanced medicine.”
Last fall, EmendoBio determined a significant shift in strategy toward focusing and delving into biological research and developments that were the basis upon which the company was established rather than attempting to self-manufacture and sell products based on its technology. As part of this move, it underwent significant reorganization, with its entire management being replaced and the positions of non-core employees reduced.
From its headquarters in Rehovot, EmendoBio has developed a unique CRISPR-based gene editing technology. The technology aims to optimize and accurately assess the genome editing process, with its main objective being the development of medical applications to treat chronic genetic diseases, especially various types of cancer.
CRISPR (short for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) is a term for a set of genes from the DNA of bacteria and other microorganisms. This group of genes serves as the bacteria’s defense system against foreign invaders, such as viruses, among other things, by creating and preserving an immune memory mechanism. A bacterium infected by a virus is inserted with the DNA helices of that virus, resulting in protein formation and cell replication with the ‘infected’ DNA. Hence, CRISPR plays an essential role in the immune system. As a result, CRISPR became a fundamental mechanism by which biotech companies develop technological platforms to produce biological drugs targeting genetic diseases and even terminal diseases, such as cancer.
In the case of EmendoBio, its novel nuclease discovery platform, OMNITM, makes the process of genetic editing as precise as possible, including allele-specific editing, while maintaining high efficiencies. Thus, it increases the safety and efficacy of the drugs developed on its basis, thereby adapting the platform to treat as many diseases as possible.