Editas Medicine and Sandhill Therapeutics, Inc. Announce Collaboration to Develop Engineered Cell Medicines to Treat Cancer
January 13, 2020 at 01:55 pm
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Editas Medicine, Inc. and Sandhill Therapeutics, Inc., a cellular immuno-oncology company, announced a strategic research collaboration, license, and option agreement to combine their respective genome editing and cell therapy technologies to discover, develop, and manufacture allogeneic engineered natural killer (NK) cells and non-alpha beta T cell medicines for the treatment of cancer. This collaboration brings together Editas Medicine’s leading genome editing technology and Sandhill’s BINATE product process, a novel universal donor technology to extract, isolate, and expand NK cells and non-alpha beta T cells, to develop novel medicines for the treatment of solid tumor cancers. Under the terms of the agreement, Editas Medicine obtains an exclusive license to Sandhill’s technology to research, develop and commercialize immuno-oncology engineered cell medicines for solid tumors originating within a given area of the body and an option to expand such license to two additional areas. In return, Sandhill will receive an upfront payment, development and sales-based milestone payments, and royalties on sales of resulting Editas products.
Editas Medicine, Inc. is a clinical-stage genome editing company. The Company is focused on developing potentially transformative genomic medicines to treat a broad range of serious diseases. It has developed a proprietary gene editing platform based on CRISPR technology. CRISPR uses a protein- ribonucleic acid (RNA) complex composed of an enzyme, including either CRISPR associated protein 9 (Cas9) or Cas12a (CRISPR from Prevotella and Francisella 1, also known as Cpf1), bound to a guide ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecule designed to recognize a particular deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequence. It is engaged in the development of vivo administered gene editing medicines, in which the medicine is injected or infused into the patient to edit the cells inside their body. Its lead program, reni-cel, is an experimental ex vivo gene-edited medicine to treat sickle cell disease (SCD), a severe inherited blood disease that causes premature death, and transfusion-dependent beta thalassemia (TDT).