Circio Holding and NeoRegen Biotech have signed a second Material Transfer Agreement (MTA) to advance their ongoing collaboration for the delivery of circular RNA (circRNA) expression-based therapeutics.  

The collaboration now is progressing to the in vivo preclinical stage following successful proof-of-concept (POC) results from in vitro studies. 

The collaboration was formed in 2023 with the aim of providing solutions to the critical challenges in the delivery of nucleic acid medicines. 

Circio develops circular RNA-based expression systems for next generation gene and cell therapy, while NeoRegen Biotech is a provider of intracellular delivery solutions. 

The in vivo studies aim to further validate the therapeutic potential of circRNA expression vectors through the integration of Circio’s circVec platform with NeoRegen’s Neoregen Intra-Cellular delivery Technology (NICT). 

“The successful transition into in vivo studies marks a pivotal step in our co-development of circular RNA vector therapeutics,” said Dr Jeongmin Seo, CEO of NeoRegen Biotech. “Combining NeoRegen’s NICT platform with Circio’s circVec technology has the potential to overcome key nucleic acid delivery barriers to fully realise the promise of gene and cell therapies.” 

“It is a very important milestone in the partnership that NeoRegen Biotech has decided to progress to in vivo testing of their unique NICT platform with circVec DNA vectors,” added Dr Thomas Hansen, CTO of Circio. “The NICT delivery technology has shown strong promise to enable efficient delivery of DNA-format therapeutics to specific tissues. The planned in vivo studies will generate essential data to identify target disease indications and progress circVec-NICT candidates towards future clinical studies.”

Diana Turner, Senior Digital Content Editor, DDW