On January 9, 2023 GreenLight Biosciences Holdings, PBC (Nasdaq:GRNA), and EpiVax Therapeutics Inc, reported that they have signed an exclusive collaboration agreement to jointly develop and commercialize personalized mRNA-based vaccine candidates for cancers (Press release, EpiVax, JAN 9, 2023, View Source [SID1234626177]).
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GreenLight Biosciences is a public benefit corporation striving to bring effective and safe RNA-based solutions to make food clean and affordable for everyone and dedicated to developing health solutions for every person on our planet. Epivax Theraeutics Inc. is a biotechnology company with extensive experience in immune-engineering more effective vaccines that recently completed an end-to-end computational pipeline for the design of precision cancer immunotherapies, Ancer.
Under this collaboration, the companies will design and develop new personalized mRNA cancer vaccine candidates using GreenLight and EpiVax Therapeutics technology platforms. EpiVax Therapeutics has developed a proprietary computational tool for precision immunotherapy, Ancer, an end-to-end, automated platform that integrates multiple advanced algorithms into a single pipeline to rapidly design custom therapies for individual cancer patients using each patient’s own tumor genome sequence as the starting point for the vaccine design. The Ancer algorithms include two extensively validated tools, EpiMatrix and JanusMatrix, which, when used together, identify the most immunogenic CD8 and CD4 neoepitopes while excluding potentially tolerogenic epitopes that may reduce vaccine efficacy. EpiVax Therapeutics was the first personalized vaccine company to use computational tools to identify tolerogenic epitopes in neoantigens and to exclude these from cancer vaccine designs. EpiVax Therapeutics’ pipeline currently includes vaccine design capacity for bladder cancers and other solid tumors.
GreenLight’s mRNA design, formulation and manufacturing expertise is currently applied to research and develop mRNA vaccine candidates, including a collaboration with the NIH to develop a next generation Covid vaccine, and a multi-target license agreement with Serum Institute of India, which includes developing a shingles vaccine candidate. GreenLight has also completed two commercial-scale engineering runs manufacturing mRNA at scale, in partnership with Samsung Biologics. This includes production of drug substance and lipid nanoparticle formulation to produce bulk drug product in a single facility, producing 650g of mRNA.
Together, GreenLight and EpiVax Therapeutics will leverage their respective expertise and jointly develop and commercialize potential novel personalized mRNA-based vaccine candidates for a wide range of oncology indications.
"We are delighted to partner with EpiVax Therapeutics, to expedite development of personalized cancer vaccine candidates using GreenLight’s RNA platform," said Andrey Zarur, CEO of GreenLight. "We are excited to combine our mRNA design and manufacturing expertise with EpiVax Therapeutics’ neoantigen discovery platform and oncology expertise to build towards a future of accessible and timely oncology vaccines."
EpiVax Therapeutics CEO, Nicole Ruggiero, added, "I am excited by what lies ahead. We have found the ideal partner for our personalized vaccine program in GreenLight Biosciences. Combining our advanced Ancer pipeline for personalized cancer vaccine design with GreenLight’s expertise in mRNA production is a win-win for the companies and for cancer patients."