Firm claims Genetic Elements platform can reduce development time to five weeks.

Swiss firm Selexis will use its Sure Cell Line Development Platform™ to generate production cell lines for Zyngenia’s lead Zybody™ therapeutic platforms.

Selexis offers a comprehensive suite of solutions for stable, high-yield mammalian cell lines used to generate recombinant proteins. The company’s Sure Cell Line Development services and technology includes the Selexis Genetic Elements™ platform, which it claims can reduce traditional cell-line development time from 12 months to about five weeks. Selexis says the platform also improves the yield and stability of production cell lines and can boost recombinant protein expression in mammalian cells in suspension and in serum-free by more than 20-fold.

Selexis Genetic Elements are based on human DNA sequences that can be applied to control the dynamic organization of transgenes in chromatin. The elements function by insulating nearby genes from the effect of surrounding chromatin, and as a result increase the copy number-dependent, position-independent expression of genes.

Selexis can apply its technologies to either a client’s own fully documented cell line, or commercially available fully documented cell lines. The technology has been proven to be functional in many cell types, including (CHO [S, DG44, K1, duxB], BHK, HEK-293, B cells, and C2C12.
Zyngenia is a privately held biotherapeutics company focused on the development of the next-generation of antibody-derived drugs for the treatment of cancer, autoimmune, and inflammatory diseases. It is specifically developing a class of multispecific antibody-based therapeutics known as Zybodies™. The molecules are designed to display the beneficial attributes of monoclonal antibodies into a single antibody-like protein that is able to interact with multiple targets. This multispecificity means Zybodies can address perhaps four different antigens at the same time, Zyngenia claims. The firm aims to use its Zybody technology to develop single molecule therapeutics against diseases including cancer and autoimmune diseases, and apply the approach to drug targets that have not proven intractable to single specificity monoclonal antibodies.

Zyngenia was founded in 2008. In September this year the firm received a $15 million extension to its Series A financing round, with a new investment from New Enterprise Associates. The new investment took the total raised in the Series A round to $25 million.

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