Pittsburgh-based Avista Therapeutics has inked a partnership deal with Swiss pharma company Roche to develop AAV gene therapy vectors for eye diseases. The collaboration will use Avista’s single-cell adeno-associated virus (AAV) engineering platform, scAAVengr, to develop intravitreal AAV capsids that match a capsid profile defined by Roche.
Under the terms of the deal, Roche will pay Avista $7.5 million upfront. If the initial partnership is successful, Avista will be eligible for additional payments during the research phase as well as clinical and sales milestones. There will also be royalties for any commercial products that come out of the partnership. In total, the partnership agreement has a potential deal value greater than $1 billion.
Avista’s in vivo scAAVengr platform uses a high-throughput approach with built-in quantitative validation of novel cell-specific AAVs. This allows for fast translation of transformative gene therapies into the clinic for diseases of the eye. Avista plans to develop a proprietary pipeline based on a toolkit of AAV variants that can target gene delivery to individual retinal cell types.
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