Orchard Therapeutics and SIRION to enhance gene therapy manufacturing efficiency

Orchard Therapeutics, a leading commercial-stage biopharmaceutical company dedicated to transforming the lives of patients with serious and life-threatening rare diseases through innovative gene therapies, and SIRION Biotech GmbH, have announced the entry into a license agreement, pursuant to which Orchard has licensed SIRION’s LentiBOOST technology to enhance manufacturing efficiency for certain of Orchard’s ex vivo autologous hematopoietic stem cell gene therapy drug candidates.

“At Orchard Therapeutics, we are establishing manufacturing capabilities to deliver potentially transformative gene therapy products to rare disease patients around the globe. Optimisation of lentiviral transduction through a technology such as LentiBOOST, along with the build-out of our recently announced manufacturing facility, are representative of our continued efforts to increase efficiencies and further streamline our approach to manufacturing gene therapy candidates,” said Stewart Craig, PhD, Chief Manufacturing Officer of Orchard.

Under the terms of the agreement, SIRION will provide Orchard with a license to its proprietary lentiviral transduction enhancer LentiBOOST for development and commercialisation activities for select Orchard programmes.

SIRION will be entitled to upfront and milestone payments and is eligible to receive royalties on net sales of future products that utilise the LentiBOOST technology.

“LentiBOOST was designed to enhance lentiviral transduction performance for difficult cell types like primary T-cells and hematopoietic stem cells,” said Dr Christian Thirion, founder and Chief Executive Officer of SIRION.

“We make our technology available to a wide range of companies and academic agencies – from explorative research hospitals to commercial gene therapy companies. We are delighted that the LentiBOOST technology may help Orchard further enhance the efficiency of its lentiviral-based manufacturing processes.”