THIS COMPREHENSIVE PROGRAM WILL GIVE US THE OPPORTUNITY TO DEMONSTRATE HOW ENABLING MODIFICATIONS AND LIMITLESS SCALE CAN BE UNLOCKED BY OUR EZRNA PLATFORM .
INDUSTRY WATCH
THIS COMPREHENSIVE PROGRAM WILL GIVE US THE OPPORTUNITY TO DEMONSTRATE HOW ENABLING MODIFICATIONS AND LIMITLESS SCALE CAN BE UNLOCKED BY OUR EZRNA PLATFORM .
Drug ( IND ) submission to the Federal Food and Drug Administration ( FDA ).
The team is initially focusing on cancer and will explore the platform ’ s potential for difficult-to-treat infectious diseases .
EnPlusOne Biosciences is to be part of a collaboration led by the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University that has been awarded an agreement for up to $ 27 million by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health ( ARPA-H ).
The agreement covers multi-disciplinary efforts to develop a disease-agnostic novel RNA therapeutic with the potential to treat diverse diseases , including types of cancer and infectious diseases – w and to be effectively and rapidly deployable .
Initially , up to $ 3.5 million of the agreement is focused on the EnPlusOne enzymatic platform .
The ARPA-H project will build on a newly developed Duplex RNA technology and leverage the powerful RNA delivery capabilities developed by groups at the Wyss Institute , along with the groundbreaking enzymatic RNA synthesis capabilities of EnPlusOne to optimize the RNA ’ s design and scalability .
Dan Ahlstedt , Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer , EnPlusOne Biosciences , said : “ We come full circle rejoining our Wyss colleagues for this exciting collaboration . This comprehensive program will give us the opportunity to demonstrate how enabling modifications and limitless scale can be unlocked by our ezRNA platform . We are grateful to the Wyss Institute and ARPA-H for recognizing the current problems facing RNA manufacturing and sharing our vision that an enzymatic approach is the future . We look forward to progressing our platform alongside this team as we collectively work to address critical human health challenges .”
ARPA-H is a federal funding agency which funds transformative biomedical and health research breakthroughs , translating prioritized research from the lab to applications in the marketplace .
Wyss Institute Core Faculty member Natalie Artzi , Ph . D . is the lead-investigator on the project with co-principal investigator and Wyss Institute Founding Director Don Ingber , M . D ., Ph . D .
The ARPA-H award will allow the Wyss Institute team to significantly accelerate and expand efforts to advance the therapy towards an Investigational New
Artzi also is Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School ( HMS ) and Brigham and Women ’ s Hospital and a Principal Research Scientist at MIT .
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