The data generated during this fruitful collaboration with Prof. Langer’s lab and published in Nano Letters are very important for Curadigm. it represents an external validation of our concept to address the unmet needs of nucleic acid – based therapeutics. The potential of the Nanoprimer to improve treatment efficacy by avoiding liver clearance is a great opportunity to accelerate the development of RNA-based therapeutics and to bring a real benefit for the patients.
Matthieu Germain, CEO of Curadigm
Paris, France and Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA), 10 June 2020 – CURADIGM today announced the publication, with Prof. Robert Langer’s lab at MIT, of pre-clinical in vivo results showing that its Nanoprimer can improve the efficacy of RNA-based therapeutics. This collaboration utilized next-generation RNA technology developed at the Langer Lab, in combination with Curadigm’s proprietary “Nanoprimer” technology. The Nanoprimer is designed to precisely, but transiently, occupy the hepatic pathways responsible for therapeutic clearance. In pre-clinical studies, the combination resulted in significantly increased bioavailability and efficacy of siRNA and mRNA in vivo.
Published in Nano Letters—one of the premier nanotechnology journals—the results are the culmination of a 2-year research collaboration evaluating the utility of the Curadigm’s Nanoprimer in increasing the efficacy of nucleic-acid based therapeutics. Combined with mRNA and siRNA-based therapeutics, the Nanoprimer increased efficacy by 32% and 49% respectively in the study. This was correlated with decreased liver trapping and increased blood bioavailability of 8 and 16- fold, respectively, without any additional associated toxicity.
Nucleic acid-based therapeutics (RNA and DNA) represent a rapidly growing segment of the biotech and pharma market, showing nearly exponential growth in programs over the last decade. While RNA-based therapeutics hold great potential to treat diverse and challenging diseases, their clinical utility has been limited by the difficulty achieving efficient accumulation in target tissues. This is largely due to the rapid liver clearance of RNA and DNA-based therapeutics. This promising new data, highlights the potential for the Nanoprimer technology to enable greater efficacy for nucleic acid-based therapeutics, facilitate their advancement toward the clinic and strengthen their ability to efficiently target a diverse range of tissues, including non-liver.
This collaboration provides validation of Curadigm’s approach to increasing therapeutic bioavailability and efficacy. The Nanoprimer technology is broadly applicable across multiple drug classes including nanomedicines, nucleic acid therapeutics, and gene editing technologies. The system does not modify the therapeutic at all, rather it is a precisely designed nanoparticle that is administered just prior to a therapeutic and works on a universal liver clearance mechanism for intravenous (IV) therapeutics.