TechBio Weekly News: Roche
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✴️ TechBio Weekly News: Roche (F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG, commonly known as Roche, SIX: RO)
“Since there can be no meaning without consciousness, it’s not our Universe giving meaning to conscious beings, but conscious beings giving meaning to our Universe.”
By Max Tegmark, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
TechBio Weekly News: Roche
💈 Dyno Therapeutics Inc
Dyno Therapeutics announced on January 13, 2025 that Roche (SIX: RO, ROG; OTCQX: RHHBY) (Basel, Switzerland) has exercised its option to license a novel capsid for use in a gene therapy program for an undisclosed neurological disease indication (Dyno Therapeutics Announces Exercise of Option by Roche for Next-Generation AAV Vector for Neurological Gene Therapy). The capsid license is pursuant to the agreement between Dyno and Roche originally announced in May 2020 and Dyno will receive option exercise fee of $7M with the potential to earn over $220M in associated development, regulatory and commercial milestone payments plus royalties.
Back in October 2020, Roche and Cambridge Massachusetts based Dyno Therapeutics decided to develop together gene therapies using AI, for nervous system and liver-directed gene therapies (a partnership valued at up to $1.8 billion). Dyno Therapeutics founded in 2018 in US, is a company transforming the gene therapy landscape with AI-powered adeno-associated virus (AAV) vectors, offering products such as the Dyno bCap 1™ capsid product, that is a breakthrough central nervous system (CNS)-targeted AAV gene delivery 🚚 vector that provides dramatically improved CNS delivery and liver detargeting—when compared to leading natural capsids—and stronger all-around characteristics relative to other engineered CNS-IV capsids. Apart bCap1, Dyno launched in 2023 the Dyno eCap 1™ capsid product, a leading eye AAV gene delivery vector that provides significantly improved delivery to the eye compared to other externally engineered capsids, including transduction throughout multiple layers of the retina.
Dyno places a big emphasis on collaborations, and already has partnerships with Astellas Pharma, Novartis, Spark Therapeutics and Sarepta Therapeutics. Regarding Roche, on October 24, 2024 Roche expanded Dyno gene therapy collaboration, betting up to $1B-plus that AI can help design better delivery tools. In a new second deal potentially worth more than $1 billion, Roche payed Dyno $50M upfront to design novel AAV vectors 🚚 with “improved functional properties” as delivery tools for gene therapies. This second collaboration agreement is providing Roche with further access to Dyno’s field-leading platform and sequence design methods including Dyno’s Low-shot Efficient Accelerated Performance (LEAPSM) technology, which accelerates gene therapy vector engineering by generating high-performance out-of-distribution capsid proteins. More specifically, Dyno’s LEAPSM technology achieves super-human design of capsids that perform dramatically better than all prior variants, supporting earlier in vivo validation of high-performance DNA delivery.
💈 Accelerate, Redesign and Collaborate (ARC)
Sheba Medical Center’s innovation arm, Accelerate, Redesign and Collaborate (ARC), has partnered 🤝 (November 21, 2024) with Roche to advance the diagnosis and treatment of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) by leveraging AI (ARC and Roche collaborate to enhance NSCLC diagnostics using AI). This collaboration aims to integrate AI with digital pathology tools to enhance the speed and accuracy of NSCLC diagnostics. The partnership will see the co-development of digital pathology solutions on Roche’s navify Digital Pathology platform.
Swiss company 🧀 contributing to AI-empowered healthcare solutions in China ⛩️
Roche is expanding its advantages in data analysis and integration into a wider range of therapeutic fields, hence contributing to high-quality healthcare development in China.
💈 Roche and Digital Pathology
Roche announced on September 9, 2024 the expansion of its digital pathology open environment, with the integration of more than 20 advanced AI algorithms from eight new collaborators (Roche advances AI-driven cancer diagnostics by expanding its digital pathology open environment). The integration🗂️ is facilitated through Roche's navify Digital Pathology enterprise software, an application for the pathologist's workflow, which now incorporates a diverse range of AI-driven algorithms, creating easy access to third-party innovation.