The Northern Alliance Advanced Therapies Treatment Centre (NA-ATTC) is delighted to welcome three new industry partners to its consortium, Achilles Therapeutics, VascVersa and pHion Therapeutics, to support its work in accelerating the adoption of advanced therapies. Collaborating with these companies provides access to two new exemplar advanced therapies (Achilles Therapeutics and VascVersa) and technology with applications for gene therapy production (pHion Therapeutics), it also extends NA-ATTC’s geographic footprint to Northern Ireland.
Please find below some information on each of the new partners:
Achilles Therapeutics
Achilles is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing precision T cell therapies targeting clonal neoantigens: protein markers unique to the individual that are expressed on the surface of every cancer cell. The Company has two ongoing Phase I/IIa trials, the CHIRON trial in patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and the THETIS trial in patients with recurrent or metastatic melanoma. Achilles uses DNA sequencing data from each patient, together with its proprietary PELEUS™ bioinformatics platform, to identify clonal neoantigens specific to that patient, and then develop precision T cell-based product candidates specifically targeting those clonal neoantigens.
pHion Therapeutics
phion Therapeutics are a drug delivery technology company spun out of Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland. pHion are commercialising RALA, a patented, 30 amino acid, peptide based DDS which condenses anionic cargo of any size (DNA,RNA, small molecules) to nanoparticles, and is highly efficient at cellular entry, without the manufacturing complexity or safety issues of viruses.
pHion are also developing RALA-V. A peptide based nanoparticle technology that formulates RALA/DNA nanoparticles optimised for efficient AAV production for use in gene therapy applications. In head to head studies, the RALA-V technology has already shown superior performance in terms of protein synthesised from the DNA cargo, AAV8 Capsid production and genome containing AAVs against the current industry standard transfection reagent.
VascVersa
VascVersa is a new regenerative company recently spun out from Queen’s University Belfast. VascVersa develops first-in-class medicine from its proprietary Angicyte™ technology. Angicyte™ consists of living cells specially formulated to create new blood vessels and promote healing. VascVersa will commercialise Advanced Therapies that provide solutions to chronic wounds with an initial focus on non-healing diabetic ulcers.
