Editas Medicine, Mass Innovation Labs, Sinequa, And More: News From December 2016

December 19, 2016 | News, products, and partnerships from around the bio-IT community including news from Editas Medicine, Mass Innovation Labs, Sinequa, and more.

Editas Medicine announced new exclusive licenses of intellectual property related to CRISPR technologies. The global licensing agreements include intellectual property owned by the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard (Broad Institute), Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Wageningen University, the University of Iowa, and the University of Tokyo for the new CRISPR genome editing system known as Cpf1, advanced forms of Cas9, and additional Cas9-based genome editing technologies. In addition, these licenses employ the inclusive innovation model developed by Broad Institute, Harvard University, and MIT, which is designed to maximize the opportunity for groundbreaking innovations to reach the largest number of patients. 

Cpf1 is a CRISPR genome editing system that has been recently characterized and engineered and which may be applied to make medicines for humans, among other applications. Cpf1 complements the Cas9 genome editing system as the Cpf1 protein is structurally distinct, has independent intellectual property, and has several potential benefits, including:

· Increasing the number of sites in the genome that can be edited, because it has distinct protospacer adjacent motifs (PAMs);

· Simpler manufacture and delivery, because the natural system requires only a short, single CRISPR guide RNA and does not include a tracrRNA; and

· Increased efficiency and accuracy for some forms of gene repair, because it makes staggered DNA cuts.

Under the terms of the combined licenses for Cpf1, advanced forms of Cas9, and additional Cas9-based genome editing technologies, Editas Medicine will make total upfront cash payments of $6.25 million and issue a promissory note totaling $10 million that can be settled in stock or cash over a predefined period. In the future, Editas Medicine may make additional payments, in cash or stock upon reaching goals and targets related to research and development, commercialization, and market capitalization, and will pay royalties on products based on these technologies. Editas Medicine press release

New Mexico’s bioscience research and business leaders are launching a new statewide initiative today to accelerate the state’s burgeoning biotechnology industry. The GrowBio initiative aims to unite the public and private sectors around policies and incentives that could turn New Mexico’s biotechnology activity into a national powerhouse for new entrepreneurial endeavors, said Dr. Richard Larson, executive vice chancellor at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center. New Mexico’s biotechnology businesses have grown rapidly in recent years, generating about $1.2 billion in revenue in 2015, according to the report. That reflects the vibrant research underway at the state’s national laboratories and universities, plus aggressive efforts in the past decade to commercialize new products and services. New Mexico’s bioscience press release

Founded in 2003 to marry computational design and gene synthesis, DNA2.0 was a pioneer in the application of machine learning (or artificial intelligence) to biology. Today, the company is building on that legacy of invention with a new name: ATUM. In Egyptian mythology, ATUM was the first god, the underlying substance of the world – a product of energy and matter. The new name reflects the company’s expanded focus – manipulating the underlying substance of life (DNA) to engineer biology across the spectrum of scale, from building better genes, proteins and pathways all the way to creation of cells. DNA2.0/ATUM press release

Linguamatics released the latest version of their natural language processing (NLP) text mining platform, I2E 5.0. New capabilities in I2E 5.0 include normalization of concepts (e.g. dates, measurements, gene mutations) within unstructured text, advanced range search and a new query language EASL. These capabilities tackle the variety in big data, and accelerate insights from unstructured, semi-structured, and structured data sources. Linguamatics press release

Linguamatics introduced the I2E Asynchronous Messaging Pipeline (AMP) platform to help healthcare professionals find critical clinical insights faster using Natural Language Processing (NLP). The addition of I2E AMP to Linguamatics’ NLP text mining solution, I2E, makes the management of background healthcare workflows more efficient, and provides scalability as NLP text mining requirements grow. By automating the text mining of real-time documents, I2E AMP can provide healthcare professionals with rapid insights and help them make timely – and potentially critical – clinical decisions. Linguamatics press release

Sinequa and Ekimetrics announced a partnership agreement. The combined power of Sinequa’s Cognitive Search & Analytics platform with Ekimetrics’ in-depth data science and machine learning expertise provides customers an integrated, end-to-end approach to quickly extract value from their Enterprise structured and unstructured data. Sinequa and Ekimetrics press release

Synpromics announced a collaboration with Sartorius Stedim Cellca (Cellca) to evaluate and test its customized synthetic promoters with Sartorius’ proprietary mammalian production cell platform. The goal of the program is to reduce timelines and increase yields in the development of stable cell lines for the production of biopharmaceuticals. Cellca has developed the Cellca CHO Expression Platform, an efficient system for the production of biologicals using CHO (Chinese Hamster Ovary) cells consisting of a proprietary cell line, growth medium, expression cassettes and fed-batch process. Cellca has already successfully completed more than 40 customer projects using its system. Synpromics has developed a unique panel of CHO specific synthetic promoters, using its proprietary PromPT platform, designed and selected for optimized expression of recombinant proteins. The use of these synthetic promoters is expected to result in shorter cell line development timelines and significantly enhanced yields of biological products. Sympromics and Cellca press release

IDEA Pharma and Mass Innovation Labs announced their new collaboration that provides a creative environment and program to cultivate solutions for challenges facing life science companies. The venture is entitled SkunkWeeks, a program aimed at revolutionizing the way pharma/biotech companies turn problems into solutions in just a matter of days through intensive workshops. The first SkunkWeeks, which was held in September, included two leading global pharmaceuticals companies. They tackled some of the biggest challenges the industry is facing to find workable solutions that will benefit both companies and patients. IDEA Pharma and Mass Innovation Labs press release