BioN­Tech and Mati­nas end oral mR­NA de­liv­ery col­lab­o­ra­tion

Mati­nas’ col­lab­o­ra­tion with Ger­many’s BioN­Tech has end­ed — af­ter an at­tempt to de­liv­er mR­NA oral­ly failed to work in mice.

The New Jer­sey biotech an­nounced the news in its first-quar­ter earn­ings Wednes­day, say­ing that an in vi­vo study ear­li­er this month failed to show any pre­clin­i­cal ac­tiv­i­ty in a for­mu­la­tion of BioN­Tech’s re­porter fire­fly lu­ciferase mR­NA.

“We had been quite op­ti­mistic about mov­ing in­to the oral study as this new de­liv­ery tech­nol­o­gy had suc­cess­ful­ly de­liv­ered mR­NA in vit­ro in mul­ti­ple cell lines,” Mati­nas CMO Ter­ry Fer­gu­son said Wednes­day on an earn­ings call. “Be­cause of the time­lines re­quired un­der the BioN­Tech col­lab­o­ra­tion, we opt­ed to bring it for­ward for oral in vi­vo eval­u­a­tion. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, we were not suc­cess­ful in this ini­tial study.”

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