The startup has developed a gene silencing platform that enables the engineering of programmable and adaptive cell therapies, allowing for the creation of iPSC-derived products that respond to specific intra- and extra-cellular signals. This technology enhances the efficacy, safety, and accessibility of cell therapies, addressing the limitations of current therapeutic approaches.
Funding
$21.9M raised to dateRaised to date based on public sources. This may differ from the amount the company actually raised and is based only on what is publicly available on the internet.
IUFounders
Product
Problem
Current cell therapies face limitations in efficacy, safety, and accessibility due to challenges in controlling gene expression and ensuring targeted activity within specific cellular conditions or disease states. Existing technologies often lack the precision needed to modulate gene silencing in a programmable, tunable, and stable manner, hindering the development of advanced therapies for major diseases.
Solution
Laverock Therapeutics addresses these limitations with its gene editing induced gene silencing (GEiGS®) platform, which leverages the cell's natural gene regulatory mechanisms to create programmable and adaptive cell therapies. By repurposing microRNAs (miRNAs) to conditionally silence genes, GEiGS® enables precise control over gene expression, ensuring that the right genes are silenced in the right cells, at the right level, and at the right time. This approach allows for the development of advanced therapies that respond to specific intra- and extra-cellular signals, enhancing efficacy, improving safety, and increasing the accessibility of cell-based treatments. The GEiGS® platform is compatible with both autologous and allogeneic (iPSC & donor derived) product development, offering flexibility in therapeutic design and manufacturing.
Target Audience
Laverock's primary target audience includes biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies focused on developing advanced cell therapies, as well as research institutions and clinicians seeking innovative solutions for regenerative medicine and oncology.
Features
- **Programmable Gene Silencing:** Utilizes state-of-the-art in-vitro and in-vivo models to profile miRNA expression patterns, identifying miRNAs specifically expressed in a given cell type and state for context-specific silencing.
- **Tunable Gene Expression:** Computational platform recodes endogenous miRNAs, enabling a wide dynamic range of gene silencing activity and precise control of gene expression levels.
- **Stable Gene Silencing:** Minimal gene edits avoid epigenetic silencing mechanisms, allowing for highly stable RNAi activity over time and across generations.
- **Specific Gene Silencing:** Minimal gene edits, redundancy in miRNA function, control of allelic editing copy number, and physiological expression results in no detectable gain or loss of function off-target effects in engineered iPSC lines.
- **Multiplexing Capability:** Enables targeting of multiple pathways in a single engineering step, addressing therapeutic opportunities limited by current approaches.
- **Compatibility with Allogeneic and Autologous Therapies:** Demonstrated in both iPSC-derived and primary cell contexts, enabling implementation for autologous and allogeneic product development.
- **Universal Gene Editing Tool Compatibility:** Can be deployed using a broad range of different nucleases, providing freedom to choose which gene editing tools to utilize based on specific project, application, and targeting requirements.
- **Attractive Regulatory Profile:** Gene modifications used are minimal and do not require stable incorporation of non-human sequences.