SIRION Biotech and Helmholtz Center Munich find answer to pressing challenges for gene therapy with their “Munich Solution”

With the beginning of a new fiscal year SIRION Biotech GmbH, located at the Innovation and Start-up Center for Biotechnology, reported an annual growth of 140% amounting to 4 million Euros in revenue – just in time to celebrate its 10th year in business. Decisive for this success was a first milestone payment for a technology developed in cooperation with experts from the Helmholtz Center Munich, improving lentiviral transduction for clinical applications.

The technique enables significantly better uptake of therapeutic lentivirus into patient cells to improve potency. The “Munich solution” recently received approval by American supervisory officials to be tested as a gene therapy application in a large-scale phase III clinical study. Gene therapy, the repair of inherited genetic defects, is among the fastest growing medical technologies and destined to shape the future of the pharma sector. A decisive element for successful gene therapy is to secure a strategy that enables targeted and efficient uptake of a therapeutic gene into the patient cell. The difficulty here lies in how well a vector strategy can be translated from a laboratory setting into the clinical environment. Especially therapeutically relevant blood- and primary cells are notoriously difficult to modify. Even in the lab, current methods rarely reach a 30 percent success rate. This seriously decreases the chances of success for any clinical trial aimed at this cell type.
LentiBOOST helps gene therapy-developers to overcome this hurdle and greatly increase the impact of their clinical trials.