Eli Lilly plans to expand its hearing loss therapy pipeline by collaborating with Seamless Therapeutics to apply the company’s next-generation gene-editing approach, based on programmable recombinases, to develop and commercialize hearing loss treatments—a deal that could generate more than $1.12 billion for the German startup. Under a strategic global research collaboration and licensing agreement with Lilly, Seamless has agreed to design and program site-specific recombinases directed toward correcting mutations in undisclosed genes of interest related to hearing loss. Seamless has agreed to grant Lilly an exclusive license to the programmed recombinases to advance through preclinical and clinical drug development and commercialization. Lilly and Seamless will develop the treatments based on Seamless’s recombinase platform, which is designed to perform large, precise insertions of DNA in any target gene sequence, independent of the cell’s natural DNA repair pathway. Seamless will use its platform to identify a programmable recombinase capable of inserting Lilly’s genes of interest. “We’ll use a series of different models and bioinformatics to scan all the nucleotides in the region that they’re interested in. We’ll identify areas in there that are similar to, say, the wild-type binding site of these enzymes, or that we have optimism that we can evolve it to those particular sites,” Albert Seymour, PhD, Seamless’s president, CEO, and managing director, told GEN. Seamless uses its platform to reprogram two recombinase families: Cre (short for causes recombination) and large serine recombinases. “We’ll start in a region of the genome. We’ll pick nucleotide sequences in there, and then…
