Moderna, Carisma Partner to Develop In Vivo Cancer Therapies

Moderna and Carisma Therapeutics recently entered into an agreement to discover, develop, and commercialize in vivo engineered chimeric antigen receptor monocyte (CAR-M) cancer therapies.

Moderna’s expertise in mRNA and LNP technologies presents an opportunity for engineered macrophages.

“We are excited to begin this collaboration with Carisma to further expand our oncology pipeline with a differentiated in vivo cell-therapy approach,” Stephen Hoge, president of Moderna, said in the announcement.

Under the terms of the agreement, Carisma will receive a $45 million up-front cash payment and research funding and is also eligible to receive development, regulatory, and commercial milestone payments.

Carisma will be responsible for discovering and optimizing development candidates, while Moderna will lead the clinical development and commercialization of therapeutics resulting from the agreement.

Additionally, Moderna can nominate up to 12 target candidates for development and commercialization.

Gene editing has the potential to prevent and treat many diseases. Most research on genome editing aims to understand diseases using cells and animal models.

Therefore, in vitro and in vivo cancer models that resemble the challenges of intra-tumor heterogeneity are vital to understanding cells and the efficacy of new targeted treatments to a patient’s specific tumor.

In November 2021, Moderna and Metagenomi entered a strategic research and development collaboration to advance new gene-editing systems for in vivo human therapeutic applications.

Under the terms of the collaboration, Metagenomi and Moderna will advance a series of in vivo gene editing therapeutics against undisclosed targets.

The companies will utilize Metagenomi’s gene-editing tools and leverage Moderna’s mRNA platform and lipid nanoparticle (LNP) delivery technologies to develop curative therapies for patients with serious genetic conditions.

“In vivo delivery directly to monocytes and macrophages enables an off-the-shelf therapeutic approach that uses the patients’ own cells to provide a truly personalized treatment,” Steven Kelly, president and CEO of Carisma, added.

 “Combining Carisma’s expertise in engineered macrophage biology and Moderna’s pioneering in vivo mRNA delivery technologies, increases the potential of this novel therapeutic approach for treating cancer. We are thrilled to be working with Moderna,” Kelly concluded.