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For fimaNAc, we have now, with the top 10 pharma collaboration, which is AstraZeneca, expanded this to other disease areas. We have some very encouraging results with and such synergies shown with our technology within oncology in this collaboration. And now there was a wish to enhance or expand the scope to look also at other disease areas. This collaboration is now valid and open for experimental studies until the end of the year. So it’s a limited time, but there’s a clear plan for what should be done within this time before the end of the year. And then in the agreement, there is a 6-month time period afterwards for discussion on potential next steps based on what we achieved during this last half year of the collaboration.
We have also had a promising early response on a patent application for mRNA delivery, which is highly relevant for a number of these – several of these collaboration partners or partnerships that we have established with fimaNAc.
And talking about partners, I will go into the fimaNAc technology, nucleic acid therapeutics. This is then developing, or delivering I mean, nucleic acid therapeutics very efficiently into cells. Nucleic acid therapeutics or gene therapies or different kinds of therapies related to gene therapy are all very large molecules, and they utilize the machinery that are inside cells to do the work they are supposed to do. They can either go in and knock down genes to stop production of a harmful protein, for example, where you can give something as you can do with siRNA or microRNA or you can use mRNA or DNA to place
in this to enhance the production of something beneficial that you want to induce a protein that you want to increase the production of. So therapeutic protein production. So instead of doing these productions, which is very cumbersome outside or in a factory, where you need to have a biological manufacturing and you get a product that is not as well-defined as normally small molecules are, and it’s very expensive and quality control of it is quite cumbersome. What you can do is to give something that actually makes your own cells producing the same protein. And by this, you use the body as the manufacturing process for that specific protein. So it’s a very smart way of using it.
Now the only problem with this is that they are large molecules, very large molecules and they need to get into cells to use the machinery inside cells to get this done. And we have a technology to deliver them efficiently into cells. And we do this because all of these are taken up through endocytosis, but then they’re trapped in endosomes and broken down in lysosomes. But with our technology, we can release them from the endosome so they get into the cytosol and can exert the therapeutic effect.
For this specific program, we are using a collaborative approach. We don’t have nucleic acid therapeutics ourselves. So we go out to companies that are developing this very promising new class of drugs, telling them that we have a very efficient way of delivering these. And we have established collaborations with – currently with 6 companies that are key players in this field, all from big pharma like AstraZeneca, down to small biotechs like eTheRNA. And several of these are actually working with mRNA, which relates to the promising response that we have now on a patent application for mRNA delivery, highly relevant for several of these collaborations.
