Selecta Biosciences & Sanofi Sign Global Collaboration

Selecta Biosciences, Inc. recently announced it has entered into a strategic global collaboration with Sanofi to discover highly targeted, antigen-specific immunotherapies for life-threatening allergies. Under the agreement, Sanofi obtains an exclusive license to develop an immunotherapy designed to abate acute immune responses against a life-threatening food allergen and an option to develop two additional candidate immunotherapies for allergies each to a specific food or aeroallergen.

The products resulting from this collaboration will leverage Selecta’s proprietary Synthetic Vaccine Particle (SVP) platform, which has unique capabilities to engineer nanoparticles with the ideal structure and composition to produce immune tolerance by balancing the overactive response to specific allergy-causing antigens.

Under the terms of the agreement, Selecta is eligible to receive several preclinical, clinical, regulatory, and sales milestones totaling $300 million per allergen indication for up to three immunotherapy candidates contemplated by this collaboration. Selecta is also entitled to up to double-digit tiered royalties as percentage of product net sales for each commercialized immunotherapy.

As part of the research alliance, Sanofi will work together with Selecta to design antigen-specific immunotherapies that meet unmet needs as defined by Sanofi for applications where Selecta’s technology can offer a new therapeutic approach for life-threatening and other severe allergies. Under the terms of the agreement, Sanofi will have access to Selecta’s proprietary Synthetic Vaccine Particle platform that is designed to create robust antigen-specific immune responses for superior immunotherapy effectiveness. This collaboration is aligned with Sanofi’s strategic focus areas in immunology and leverages Sanofi’s Boston-based research and development capabilities.

“We are very pleased that Sanofi, a global leader in vaccines and immunology is entering into a partnership with Selecta to develop and commercialize products from our immunotherapy platform,” said Werner Cautreels, PhD, Selecta’s President and CEO. “In allergies, as well as auto-immune diseases, organ transplantation, and protein replacement therapies, there is a lack of specific, effective and safe treatments to prevent undesired immune reactions. Selecta’s SVP technology can restore balance to dysregulated immune systems by producing immune tolerance to specific antigens. Our approach addresses the underlying causes of these diseases and thereby makes advances beyond today’s symptomatic treatments and allergen avoidance strategies.”

Selecta Biosciences, Inc. is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing an entirely new class of targeted vaccines that induces an antigen-specific immune activation or antigen-specific immune tolerance for therapeutic and prophylactic applications. Selecta was founded based on complementary research by three academic pioneers, the nanotechnology innovations of Professors Robert Langer and Omid Farokhzad combined with the immunological insights of Professor Ulrich von Andrian.

Selecta’s proprietary Synthetic Vaccine Particle platform creates a new paradigm in vaccine development, enabling completely new therapeutic and prophylactic applications while offering the potential of improved efficacy and safety profiles. Selecta’s fully synthetic engineering of novel vaccines offers a number of compelling benefits, including flexible modular vaccine design and accelerated development timelines using robust manufacturing processes. Selecta’s SVP platform technology is readily adaptable to enable diverse vaccines and immunotherapies. For more information, visit www.selectabio.com.