Sangamo rescues Txcell

Take a wannabe cell therapy player with considerable genome-editing expertise, pair it up with a cash-strapped pioneer in a hot new area of research, and a deal is bound to materialise. Step forward Sangamo, the zinc finger nuclease expert, which today bought France’s Txcell for €72m ($84m). Txcell’s unique selling point was CAR-Treg therapy: this is closely related to CAR-T, but thanks to the use of T regulatory cells it damps down rather than stimulates immune response, and thus targets autoimmune disease, not cancer. The Sangamo deal is the latest of several with a Treg focus, and such a pioneering approach might have been expected to yield Txcell’s investors more than €72m. In reality, however, this is probably the best they could have hoped for: Txcell has spent much of the past few years unwinding a deeply unprofitable Ferring deal, developing a manufacturing system and tidying up its capital structure. After generating promising early results with unmodified Tregs in Crohn’s disease Txcell vowed to become the first company to start a clinical trial of a CAR-Treg – an anti-HLA-A2 asset for use in organ transplantation. This task now falls to Sangamo.