CEO Lex Rovner (64x Bio)

George Church backs a start­up so­lu­tion to the mas­sive gene ther­a­py man­u­fac­tur­ing bot­tle­neck

George Church and his grad­u­ate stu­dents have spent the last decade seed­ing star­tups on the ra­zor’s edge be­tween bi­ol­o­gy and sci­ence fic­tion: gene ther­a­py to pre­vent ag­ing, CRISPRed pigs that can be used to har­vest or­gans for trans­plant, and home kits to test your poop for healthy or un­healthy bac­te­ria. (OK, maybe they’re not all on that ra­zor’s edge.)

But now a new spin­out from the De­part­ment of Ge­net­ics’ sec­ond floor is tack­ling a far hum­bler prob­lem — one that ma­jor com­pa­ny af­ter ma­jor com­pa­ny has stum­bled over as they tried to get cures for rare dis­eases and oth­er gene ther­a­pies in­to the clin­ic and past reg­u­la­tors: How the hell do you build these?

There’s a lot hap­pen­ing for new ther­a­pies but not enough at­ten­tion around this prob­lem,” Lex Rovn­er, who was a post-doc at Church’s lab from 2015 to 2018, told End­points News. “And if we don’t fig­ure out how to fix this, many of these ther­a­pies won’t even reach pa­tients.”

This week, with Church and a cou­ple oth­er promi­nent sci­en­tists as co-founders, Rovn­er launched 64x Bio to tack­le one key part of the man­u­fac­tur­ing bot­tle­neck. They won’t be look­ing to retro­fit plants or build gene ther­a­py fac­to­ries, as Big Phar­ma and big biotech are now spend­ing bil­lions to do. In­stead, with $4.5 mil­lion in seed cash, they will try to en­gi­neer the in­di­vid­ual cells that churn out a crit­i­cal com­po­nent of the ther­a­pies.

George Church

The goal is to build cells that are fine-tuned to do noth­ing but spit out the vi­ral vec­tors that re­searchers and drug de­vel­op­ers use to shut­tle gene ther­a­pies in­to the body. Dif­fer­ent vec­tors have dif­fer­ent de­mands; 64x Bio will look to make ef­fi­cient cel­lu­lar fac­to­ries for each.

“While a few gen­er­al ways to in­crease vec­tor pro­duc­tion may ex­ist, each unique vec­tor serotype and pay­load pos­es a spe­cif­ic chal­lenge,” Church said in an emailed state­ment. “Our plat­form en­ables us to fine tune cus­tom so­lu­tions for these dis­tinct com­bi­na­tions that are par­tic­u­lar­ly hard to over­come.”

Be­fore join­ing Church’s lab, Rovn­er did her grad­u­ate work at Yale, where she stud­ied how to en­gi­neer bac­te­ria to pro­duce new kinds of pro­tein for drugs or oth­er pur­pos­es. And af­ter leav­ing Church’s lab in 2018, she ini­tial­ly set out to build a man­u­fac­tur­ing start­up with a broad fo­cus.

Yet as she spoke with hun­dreds of biotech ex­ec­u­tives on LinkedIn and in cof­fee shops around Cam­bridge, the same is­sue kept pop­ping up: They liked their gene ther­a­py tech­nol­o­gy in the lab but they didn’t know how to scale it up.

“Every­one kept say­ing the same thing,” Rovn­er said. “We ba­si­cal­ly re­al­ized there’s this huge prob­lem.”

The is­sue would soon make head­lines in in­dus­try pub­li­ca­tions: blue­bird de­lay­ing the launch of Zyn­te­glo, No­var­tis de­lay­ing the launch of Zol­gens­ma in the EU, Ax­o­vant de­lay­ing the start of their Parkin­son’s tri­al.

Part of the prob­lem, Rovn­er said, is that gene ther­a­pies are de­liv­ered on vi­ral vec­tors. You can build these vec­tors in mam­malian cell lines by feed­ing them a small cir­cu­lar strand of DNA called a plas­mid. The prob­lem is that mam­malian cells have, over bil­lions of years, evolved tools and de­fens­es pre­cise­ly to avoid mak­ing virus­es. (Lest the mam­mal they live in die of in­fec­tion).

There are ge­net­ic mu­ta­tions that can turn off some of the in­ter­nal de­fens­es and un­leash a cell’s abil­i­ty to pro­duce virus, but they’re rare and hard to find. Oth­er plat­forms, Rovn­er said, try to find these mu­ta­tions by us­ing CRISPR to knock out genes in dif­fer­ent cells and then screen­ing each of them in­di­vid­u­al­ly, a process that can re­quire hun­dreds of thou­sands of dif­fer­ent 100-well plates, with each well con­tain­ing a dif­fer­ent group of mu­tant cells.

“It’s just not prac­ti­cal, and so these plat­forms nev­er find the cells,” Rovn­er said.

64x Bio will try to find them by build­ing a li­brary of mil­lions of mu­tant mam­malian cells and then us­ing a mol­e­c­u­lar “bar­cod­ing” tech­nique to screen those cells in a sin­gle pool. The tech­nique, Rovn­er said, lets them trace how much vec­tor any giv­en cell pro­duces, al­low­ing re­searchers to quick­ly iden­ti­fy su­per-pro­duc­ing cells and their mu­ta­tions.

The tech­nol­o­gy was de­vel­oped par­tial­ly in-house but draws from IP at Har­vard and the Wyss In­sti­tute. Har­vard’s Pam Sil­ver and Wyss’s Jef­frey Way are co-founders.

The com­pa­ny is now based in So­Ma in San Fran­cis­co. With the seed cash from Fifty Years, Refac­tor and First Round Cap­i­tal, Rovn­er is re­cruit­ing and look­ing to raise a Se­ries A soon. They’re in talks with phar­ma and biotech part­ners, while they try to val­i­date the first pre­clin­i­cal and clin­i­cal ap­pli­ca­tions.

Gene ther­a­py is one fo­cus, but Rovn­er said the plat­form works for any­thing that in­volves vi­ral vec­tor, in­clud­ing vac­cines and on­colyt­ic virus­es. You just have to find the right mu­ta­tion.

“It’s the rare cell you’re look­ing for,” she said.

Image courtesy of The Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson.

Pro­tect­ing the glob­al phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal in­no­va­tion ecosys­tem – what’s at stake?

We are living in a new era of healthcare that is rapidly advancing progress impacting patient outcomes and experiences. We’ve seen a remarkable pace of transformational innovation, applied research, and advanced clinical development over the last decade.

Despite this tremendous progress, there is much more work to be done, and patients are counting on us – now more than ever – to continue that momentum. At the heart of our industry is a focus on developing and delivering medicines for some of the world’s most challenging diseases, including those that have few or no effective treatments today.

Roger Perl­mut­ter lines up deals, fresh fund­ing at Eikon; Sec­ond RSV vac­cine ap­proved; Sev­er­al biotechs flash­ing red; and more

Welcome back to Endpoints Weekly, your review of the week’s top biopharma headlines. Want this in your inbox every Saturday morning? Current Endpoints readers can visit their reader profile to add Endpoints Weekly. New to Endpoints? Sign up here.

As you come back to our website this weekend for ASCO news, don’t forget to check out our updated event lineup at BIO, which will cover everything from the current state of VC investing in biotech to top pharma R&D chiefs discussing how to make pipeline decisions.

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On­corus lays off most of its re­main­ing team, warns of wind-down as it takes one last shot at deal­mak­ing

Despite cutting its headcount, pipeline and lease late last year, Oncorus is still struggling to stay afloat and is now on the brink of bankruptcy or dissolution, the company revealed late Thursday.

The Andover, MA-based biotech is letting “substantially all of Oncorus’ workforce” go, after the board of directors approved the layoffs. CEO Ted Ashburn, COO/chief of staff Stephen Harbin and CMO John Goldberg are among the 55 to depart.

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Grail’s blood test charts path for di­ag­nos­ing pa­tients sus­pect­ed of hav­ing can­cer in large study: #AS­CO23

Grail’s vision is simple but bold. The blood testing company has long held that people are often diagnosed with cancer too late. If seemingly healthy people were screened for early signs of the disease before symptoms appear, they may be able to get more effective treatments that nip cancer in the bud.

That premise is the basis of Grail’s commercial blood test, Galleri, which searches for the genetic fingerprints of cancer in the blood. The test, launched in 2021, reaped $55 million in sales last year, but now the company is setting its sights on a new market: patients suspected of having cancer due to symptoms such as abdominal pain, rectal bleeding or unexplained weight loss. Rather than administering expensive scans or conducting invasive biopsies right away, Grail hopes doctors will consider a simple blood test.

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GSK pro­motes rou­tine im­mu­niza­tions for adults amid post-pan­dem­ic vac­cine back­slide

GSK launched a new initiative on Thursday and committed up to $1 million in grant funding to improve adult routine vaccination rates.

While the pandemic spotlight was trained on the race for novel Covid-19 vaccines, other routine vaccination rates plummeted, raising concerns that missed doses may put children and even some adults at risk of preventable diseases such as measles or shingles. The World Health Organization last year reported the largest drop in childhood vaccinations in roughly three decades.

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Tammie Denyse speaks up about Black women and breast cancer inequity in Gilead's first TikTok campaign. (Gilead Sciences)

Gilead joins Tik­Tok with on­col­o­gy aware­ness cam­paign fea­tur­ing di­verse group of can­cer ad­vo­cates

Gilead Sciences is taking over the opening page on TikTok for the next two weeks. A Gilead-sponsored video, featuring cancer advocates talking about equity and other issues, will show up as the landing page, called the “For You” page, for millions of TikTok watchers.

The cancer awareness campaign will begin on Monday and run for two weeks, a Gilead spokesperson told Endpoints News. The TikTok ad debut is timed around the ASCO medical conference, but the work is aimed more broadly at healthcare professionals, as well as people touched by cancer and people interested in advancing Black and general health equity.

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Stephen MacMillan, Hologic CEO (Photo by Riccardo Savi/Getty Images for Concordia Summit)

Il­lu­mi­na names Ho­log­ic CEO as new board mem­ber and chair

Illumina’s board appointed two new members, including Hologic CEO Stephen MacMillan as the non-executive chair, a move that followed a proxy fight that saw shareholders oust the company’s board chair.

The DNA sequencing company also appointed Scott Ullem, the CFO of Edwards Lifesciences, to the board, according to a company statement.

Illumina’s plans to add two new board members came as Carl Icahn waged a board proxy campaign culminating with shareholders electing his candidate, Andrew Teno, over board chair John Thompson. Illumina CEO Francis deSouza survived a threat to his board seat by securing more than twice the shareholder votes than his challenger. Another Illumina candidate, Robert Epstein, was also elected and remained on the board.

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Take­da ax­es gene ther­a­py deal with Po­sei­da Ther­a­peu­tics amid broad­er re­think

Less than two years after Takeda inked a collaboration with Poseida Therapeutics to develop six liver-directed and hematopoietic stem cell-directed in vivo gene therapies, Takeda will end the partnership on July 30, the company confirmed to Endpoints News.

The breakup is not unexpected, coming on the heels of Takeda’s April announcement that it planned to stop discovery and preclinical work in AAV gene therapy, as well as research and preclinical work on rare hematology. A representative for Takeda confirmed that the partnership ended because of the company’s decision to stop that work.

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Novartis headquarters in Basel, Switzerland (Kyle LaHucik for Endpoints News)

No­var­tis’ Kisqali pre­vents breast can­cer from com­ing back for longer — but can it best Eli Lil­ly’s Verzenio? #AS­CO23

CHICAGO — Novartis’ CDK4/6 inhibitor Kisqali helped early breast cancer patients stay cancer-free for longer after surgery, according to interim study results presented at ASCO.

In a Phase III study, Kisqali was added on top of endocrine therapy — the current standard treatment for early breast cancer patients. Kisqali reduced the risk of disease relapse by 25% compared with endocrine therapy alone in patients with Stage II or III HR-positive, HER2-negative breast cancer.

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