Cobra signs agreement with Cequent

UK-based Cobra Biomanufacturing has signed an agreement with Cequent Pharmaceuticals, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, to develop a treatment for an inherited form of bowel tumour (Familial Adenomatous Polyposis (FAP)). The treatment will incorporate Cobra's proprietary antibiotic free maintenance technology (ORT) in conjunction with Cequent's proprietary TransKingdom RNA interference (tkRNAi) technology.

ORT is a way of creating totally stable genetically engineered strains of micro-organisms without the use of antibiotics or antibiotic genes. Other technologies rely on either integrating the synthetic gene(s) into the bacterial chromosome or using antibiotics and antibiotic resistance genes to amplify replicating mini-chromosomes (plasmids) containing the new genes.

In the vaccine field it has been known for 10 years that the former approach leads to poor strain productivity and the latter to strain instability. Use of antibiotics also creates the risk of passing on the antibiotic resistance genes to pathogens in the environment. ORT technology avoids these problems.

This application harnesses the advantages of conventional genetic engineering with the safer ORT¢ strain stabilisation technology. This allows rapid and simple construction of bacterial strains, capable of expressing massive quantities of synthetic DNA, protein or RNA that can lead to beneficial effects against disease targets without the fear of creating antibiotic resistant strains which might be difficult to manage clinically.

'Interference RNA (RNAi) has great potential for medicine, and Cequent's tkRNAi technology clearly represents an important breakthrough for the difficult, but exciting field of RNAi delivery,' said David Thatcher, ceo at Cobra. 'We believe the combination of Cobra's ORT technology with Cequent's in vivo delivery platform will have significant clinical benefit.'