JURA Bio has entered a research collaboration with Replay cell therapy product company Syena for the development of T cell receptor (TCR)-based therapies.
JURA Bio will secure an upfront payment along with research funding for the period of the collaboration.
Replay, together with Syena, will assume the responsibility for worldwide development and hold exclusive commercialisation rights globally on all TCR-NK therapies arising from the collaboration if the option is exercised.
The deal will allow JURA Bio to receive development, regulatory and commercial milestone payments along with tiered deferred option payments on global product net sales based on TCRs resulting from the collaboration.
Furthermore, the company will receive royalties on products using a minimum of one of the licensed technologies.
JURA Bio founder and CEO Elizabeth Wood said: “The human immune system is a powerful source of safe and effective immune receptors, and while one patient might lack a TCR necessary to fight cancer, it may be present in another.
“By leveraging machine learning to rewrite the gene synthesis process from the ground up, we can produce extraordinarily high-quality immune receptors libraries to discover and train probabilistic machine learning models to ensure a faster development process that identifies TCRs recognising the most challenging therapeutic targets.”
JURA Bio has also secured $16.1m in financing, with contributions from Fontus Capital, Josh Elkington, Michael Chambers and John Ballantyne.
The funding will be used for expediting the mapping of the adaptive immune system.
By the end of next year, JURA Bio intends to conclude a predictive map of TCR-antigen-HLA binding powered by an off-the-shelf library of >100B synthesised human T cells and their HLAs and cognate antigens.
During this period, the company will also extend its machine learning-based gene synthesis into the B cell receptors’ design and discovery.
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