Novartis signs genome editing alliances with Intellia Therapeutics and Caribou Biosciences

Swiss drug major Novartis (NOVN: VX) has signed collaboration and licensing agreements with Intellia Therapeutics to develop new medicines using CRISPR genome editing technology and Caribou Biosciences for developing drug discovery tools.

CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) is an approach that allows scientists precisely edit the genes of targeted cells and is considered a powerful tool for creating very specific models of disease for use in drug discovery. The alliance with Intellia combines the resources at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research with the company’s CRISPR expertise and organization. R&D activities will focus on using CRISPR ex vivo for engineering chimeric antigen receptor T-cells (CARTs) and hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs).

Under the terms of the agreement with Intellia, Novartis is receiving exclusive rights to develop all collaboration programs focused on engineered CARTs and the right to develop an undisclosed number of targets for ex vivo editing of HSCs. In addition Novartis receives non-exclusive rights for limited in vivo therapeutic applications of CRISPR systems. Novartis is increasing its equity investment in Intellia, is making an upfront payment and will provide technology access fees and funding for R&D programs during the five-year term of the collaboration. Intellia is also eligible to receive downstream success-based milestones and royalties.