Scarlet secures $14m DARPA deal for smart red blood cells
Scarlet Therapeutics has entered into an agreement with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to advance the development of smart red blood cells (SRBCs).
Scarlet will lead a multidisciplinary consortium to develop SRBCs in a programme worth up to $14 million.
The agreement builds on the company’s ability to engineer red blood cells to contain multiple therapeutic proteins.
The programme will explore the addition of sensing and control mechanisms designed to allow engineered cells to detect physiological changes and adjust their activity in response, thereby enabling the development of improved therapies for patients.
Scarlet Therapeutics will coordinate a multidisciplinary, international consortium bringing together expertise in red blood cell biology, synthetic biology, computational design and automated cell manufacturing. Partners include the University of Bristol, where Scarlet’s foundational technology originated, Northwestern University and Unicorn Biotechnologies.
“This agreement represents an important endorsement of Scarlet’s technology and, together with our academic, industrial and government partners, gives us the opportunity to address some of the most ambitious challenges in red blood cell engineering,” said Dr Alistair Irvine, CEO of Scarlet Therapeutics.
Professor Ash Toye, CSO of Scarlet Therapeutics and the Principal Investigator of the consortium, added: “We are excited to lead this consortium and to explore how engineered red blood cells can sense and respond to changes in human physiology, while also advancing capabilities in protein retention, biological control, safety and automated manufacturing that could support a new generation of long-acting medicines.”
Scarlet Therapeutics is developing a biologics platform that engineers universal red blood cells (RBCs) into long-acting medicines, initially for metabolic disease.
The company’s technology builds on research from the University of Bristol and ongoing clinical research through the RESTORE study, a first in human clinical trial comparing the survival of lab grown RBCs with donated RBCs in human volunteers (‘transfuse’).