Exosomes start to deliver deals

Some biotech investors had probably never heard of exosomes until Codiak’s chief executive, Doug Williams, made his pitch at the JP Morgan conference two weeks ago. But the area has been gaining traction, and Jazz’s $56m up-front payment to Codiak is its biggest endorsement to date. Roche and Boehringer Ingelheim have also bought into rival technologies, which broadly seek to use exosomes as delivery vehicles for proteins, small molecules, RNA and other therapeutics. Naturally occurring exosomes are vesicles that bud off from many mammalian cells and are subsequently internalised by other cells, along with their cargo, hence their role in cell-cell communication. This gives rise to their potential as a new class of delivery vehicles for therapeutics, and Codiak seems to be furthest advanced here, boasting of being able to internalise various molecules via protein tags, and of targeting exosomes to specific cells using external markers. As a nascent technology this carries numerous problems, including accurately coding for and delivering the target therapeutic, not to mention questions around intellectual property and manufacturing at scale. While there are three listed players – Capricor, Puretech and Reneuron – no company is close to entering the clinic yet.