Novo makes a gene editing move

After a couple of recent big acquisitions, Novo Nordisk has gone back to what it knows best: collaborations over intriguing but early technology. Today’s partner is Life Edit Therapeutics, and the technology is gene editing – a hot sector that Novo has previously bet against.

As before Novo is looking beyond the big-name Crispr players: Life Edit, an Elevatebio subsidiary, is probably best known for teaming up with Moderna in February. When asked what had attracted Novo to its new collaborator, a spokesperson pointed to Life Edit’s base editing capabilities and a “broad and diverse library of nucleases”.

This, along with a range of Pam motifs – short sequences that are important for targeting the gene-editing machinery – could improve specificity and reduce the risk of off-target effects, a big worry, particularly with in vivo editing.

Base editing, which involves making single base changes in the genome, also has the advantage of avoiding the double-stranded breaks that have caused consternation with conventional Crispr nuclease-based editing. But, given the early stage of its technology, privately-held Life Edit has a long way to go to prove its bold claim of being able to make “any edit anywhere”.

Life Edit is working on both ex vivo and in vivo editing, but Novo is not saying whether it has a preference for either, telling Evaluate Vantage only that: "We would aim to develop therapies that are either first in class or best in class."

The Danish group is also not disclosing the up-front fee, but costs could add up, with Novo on the hook for milestones of $250-335m for each of seven development programmes covered by the deal. Novo is also making an undisclosed equity investment in Life Edit’s parent Elevatebio as part of that company’s $401m series D financing.

Neither are there details about what diseases Novo and Life Edit will be working on, except that they are in the rare and cardiometabolic sphere. The group has recently been making a push into rare diseases, and last September bought the sickle cell player Forma. That move looked like a gamble against gene editing, as did the previous purchase of Prothena’s PRX004 in transthyretin amyloidosis, where the Crispr specialist Intellia is active.

However, the Life Edit deal is not Novo’s first foray into gene editing: in 2019 it signed up Bluebird for in vivo editing work in haemophilia and other genetic diseases. That research is now partnered with the Bluebird spinout 2seventy Bio, to which Novo recently paid a $15m milestone relating to preclinical proof-of-concept data.

Click here to download Evaluate Vantage’s recent report on gene editing, including an interview with Life Edit.

The table in this story has been updated.