Clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company Selecta Biosciences has signed a strategic global collaboration agreement with Sanofi to develop up to three antigen-specific immunotherapies for life-threatening allergies.
The partnership gives Sanofi an exclusive license to develop an immunotherapy to suppress acute immune responses against a food allergen, as well as an option to develop two other candidate immunotherapies, each addressing a particular food or airborne allergen.
Sanofi will develop the therapies using Selecta’s proprietary Synthetic Vaccine Particle (SVP) platform, which Selecta said is able to engineer nanoparticles with the ideal structure and composition to produce immune tolerance.
For making its platform available, Selecta will receive pre-clinical, clinical, regulatory and sales milestone payments amounting to $300m per allergen indication for the candidates developed under the collaboration.
Sanofi and Selecta will work together to design antigen-specific immunotherapies to address unmet needs where Selecta’s SVP platform could allow a new approach to treating life-threatening or severe allergies.
The partnership aims to combine Selecta’s technology with Sanofi’s immunology expertise, as well as its research and development facilities in Boston, US, to enable improved immunotherapy effectiveness.
Selecta Biosciences president and CEO Dr Werner Cautreels said the company is pleased to be collaborating with Sanofi on the development and commercialisation of products using the SVP platform.
"In allergies, as well as auto-immune diseases, organ transplantation, and protein replacement therapies, there is a lack of specific, effective and safe treatments to prevent undesired immune reactions," Cautreels said.
"Selecta’s SVP technology can restore balance to dysregulated immune systems by producing immune tolerance to specific antigens."
