12.05.22 -- Listen now: Oligonucleotide Therapy Delivery, Product vs. Platform, and more.

Check out the latest episodes from Cell & Gene: The Podcast and Business of Biotech. As a member of the Life Science Connect community, you have access to content beyond our weekly newsletters, including our podcast series. Don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode!

Capstan Therapeutics' CEO, Laura Shawver, Ph.D., talks us through the company's in vivo CAR therapies and what led to the in vivo cell engineering breakthrough that has been decades in the making. Shawver explains the promise of harnessing mRNA and targeted LNP delivery to train a patient’s body to make CAR T cells in vivo. She also details best practices to garner funding and investment partnership.

PepGen is advancing oligonucleotide therapeutics with the goal of transforming the treatment of severe neuromuscular and neurologic diseases. SVP head of clinical development Dr. Michelle Mellion discusses PGN-EDO51, the company’s lead product candidate for the treatment of DMD patients whose mutations are amenable to an exon 51 skipping approach.

Nutcracker Therapeutics is a preclinical biopharma company developing multimodal RNA-based therapeutics for HPV-driven tumors, T-cell lymphoma, and genitourinary tumors. On this episode of Business of Biotech, chief business officer Geoff Nosrati, Ph.D., offers a comprehensive view of the RNA-based therapeutics landscape and sheds light on what he perceives as an advantageous position at Nutcracker — the capacity to manufacture RNA in-house.

The emerging biotech Akari Therapeutics thinks there's a broad range of medicinal value in proteins found in — wait for it — the saliva of ticks. Akari has painstakingly developed a recombinant version of one such tick saliva-derived protein, called nomacopan, and put it to work in Phase 3 trials to treat rare but deadly HSCT-TMA.

Earlier this month, Surface Oncology shared that it will open a second stage of its monotherapy trial of SRF388, an antibody targeting IL-27, on the heels of a promising Phase 2 data readout. Shortly before that release, Business of Biotech caught up with Surface's CSO Vito Palombella, Ph.D., and CEO Rob Ross, M.D., in the company's Cambridge, MA, HQ.

MIT-born startup Elicio Therapeutics' novel Amphiphile Technology Platform is designed to directly engage the lymphatic system in the deployment and delivery of therapeutic payloads. We caught up with chief scientific officer Peter DeMuth, Ph.D., at Elicio HQ in Boston to learn how the platform works.