- Tuesday, March 28, 2023 @ 12:00 am
Athebio AG, an innovation leader in the discovery and design of designed ankyrin repeat proteins (DARPins), today announced that it has entered a Development and License Agreement with Acuitas Therapeutics, a company focused on the development of delivery systems for nucleic acid therapeutics based on lipid nanoparticles (LNP).
Under the agreement, Athebio provides Acuitas with exclusive access to its Athebody DARPin technology to explore the potential of combining Athebio’s Athebody DARPins and Acuitas’ LNP technology for targeted nucleic acid delivery using DARPin-LNP and make it accessible to Acuitas’ partners.
“We are excited to be working with the leader in the LNP field in order to tackle one of the most pressing issues for nucleic acid therapeutics – its target-specific delivery,” said Patrik Forrer, one of the inventors of the DARPin technology and CEO and Chairman of Athebio. “The corona crisis has proven the huge potential of nucleic acid therapeutics, but without the possibility to deliver nucleic acids target-specifically, its application fields will remain limited. Our Athebody DARPins have ideal properties to potentially close this gap and take the mRNA technology to the next level. In particular, the highly stable Athebody DARPins should allow for simple site-specific conjugation to LNP and confer highly specific target binding. The combination of superior manufacturability and tailored target binding would have game-changing potential and we are looking forward to exploring this together with Acuitas.”
