Biotech company EnPlusOne Biosciences and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University are collaborating on a research initiative to develop a rapid, effectively deployable disease-agnostic RNA therapeutic with the potential to treat a range of diseases, including cancer and infectious diseases.
The project, led by the Wyss Institute, has been awarded an agreement for up to $27 million by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H); up to $3.5 million of the agreement will be initially directed at EnPlusOne's enzymatic platform.
The initial focus of the project will be on cancer; in a statement, the partners said that they will also explore the platform's potential for difficult-to-treat infectious diseases. The project will build on newly developed Duplex RNA technology, utilizing both RNA delivery methods developed at the Wyss Institute and enzymatic RNA synthesis capabilities developed at EnPlusOne.
EnPlusOne is a spinout from the Wyss Institute, launched in 2022 to commercialize the enzymatic RNA oligonucleotide synthesis technology developed in the laboratory of its co-founder George Church, PhD.
The ARPA-H award will allow the Wyss Institute team to accelerate development and advance the RNA therapy to an investigational new drug submission to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the organizations said in a statement. ARPA-H is a federal agency that funds transformative biomedical and health research breakthroughs.
