Developing potential functional cures for patients with acute and chronic diseases

A new treatment modality

For many years, researchers have investigated cell and gene therapies as potential replacement therapies for severe acute and chronic diseases. Despite major advancements in the field, these approaches carry a number of limitations including immune rejection, limited eligibility, durability and variability challenges, inability to re-dose and high manufacturing costs. To address these drawbacks, we developed our novel Shielded Living Therapeutics™ (SLTx) platform, which we believe has the potential to result in functional cures for patients with a wide range of acute and chronic diseases.

 

Leveraging the modularity of our SLTx platform, we have developed a growing pipeline of non-viral engineered cell based product candidates that have the potential to produce a wide range of functions or therapeutics molecules. Moreover, our product candidates are designed to be off-the-shelf, durable, controllable and redosable, without requiring modification of the patient’s genes.

 

We are presently focused on our product candidate for diabetes. While the diseases we aim to treat are quite different, our products candidates themselves are generated through three common elements: the cell, the sphere, and our streamlined manufacturing process.

The Shielded Living Therapeutics™ platform

1. Cell

2. Sphere

3. Manufacturing

  • 1 Cell

    Sigilon has developed proprietary engineered human cells that:

    • Express high levels of desired proteins, enzymes or therapeutic molecules
    • Deliver proteins at a constant rate or are programmed to “sense and respond” to the changing environment
    • Survive well in an encapsulation environment
    • Can be produced at large scale
    • Are similar to cells previously used in clinical applications
    • Provide the ability to easily insert new gene expression cassettes for different applications

  • 2 Sphere

    The sphere is composed of our proprietary Afibromer™ matrix, which is designed to exhibit ideal properties for housing thousands of therapeutic cells. Building upon foundational discoveries made at MIT, Sigilon has developed this dual-layer sphere to prevent or otherwise minimize immune rejection.

    1) Outer layer of alginate sphere with Afibromer™
    • Novel small molecule designed to prevent immune response
    • Allowing influx of nutrients and efflux of protein

    2) Inner compartment
    • Optimized for viability and productivity

  • 3 Manufacturing

    Sigilon has created a state-of-the-art manufacturing platform that is modular for all potential product candidates developed. With virtually all aspects of the platform shared across the development programs, our manufacturing process is designed for reproducibility, speed and cost-efficiency, with the hopes of providing a true “off-the-shelf” product for patients.

In preclinical studies, components of our product candidates were well-tolerated with no notable adverse effects for up to 12 months. In addition, the spheres were successfully retrieved and redosed.