In the acquisition, announced Wednesday, Kriya picks up two gene therapy programs focused on epilepsy and trigeminal neuralgia. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
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When Kriya Therapeutics launched in 2020 with $80.5 million in Series A financing, the company’s pipeline featured AAV-based gene therapies for diabetes and severe obesity. Now, Kriya, a BioSpace NextGen 2021 winner, is building a neurology pipeline with assets acquired from Redpin Therapeutics.
Redpin’s chemogenetics platform, focused on targeted cell and gene therapies for intractable diseases of the nervous system, is a potentially lucrative buy for Kriya. The CNS and gene therapy spaces have been among the hottest in 2022, receiving substantial investment.
In the acquisition Wednesday, Kriya picked up Redpin’s neurology pipeline, including two gene therapy programs focused on epilepsy and trigeminal neuralgia (TN).
Representatives didn’t announce specifics of the deal.
Redpin’s approach “selectively activates or silences disease-causing neurons that have hyperactivity, and that selective approach leaves normally functioning cells unimpacted,” Shankar Ramaswamy, M.D., co-founder and CEO of Kriya, told BioSpace.
The approach utilizes gene therapy that is directly injected into the specific site of pathology in the nervous system.
The aim is for chemogenetics to help overcome some of the challenges inherent in current treatments for focal neurological diseases including epilepsy and TN such as surgical intervention or off-target side effects.
“The protein that’s expressed by the gene therapy is an engineered ion channel that is selectively responsive to an oral small molecule drug that is given to essentially turn on or off that particular protein,” Ramaswamy said. In Redpin’s case, this is the FDA-approved smoking cessation drug varenicline (trade name Chantix).
Without that small molecule, the expressed protein is inactive; in its presence, it’s active. “You have the ability to have multiple different layers of control,” Ramaswamy said.
Varenicline itself provides another layer of control - its safety.
“[It] has been in millions of patients worldwide,” Ramaswamy said. “It’s a very safe therapy. It’s one that we know a lot about. When you think about the complexity of chemogenetics as a field, part of the challenge is having small molecules that you know are safe and well-tolerated.”
Kriya is the “perfect company to take this leading ion channel-based platform forward and deliver an effective treatment option for patients,” said Dr. Elma Hawkins, president, CEO and co-founder of Redpin in a statement.
Kriya is well-financed to take the programs forward. The company has raised more than $460 million over three rounds of financing during the past two and a half years, Ramaswamy said.
Kriya currently has four focus areas: ophthalmology, oncology, rare disease and chronic disease.
The company has been busy acquiring assets and leadership as it builds out these divisions.
In January, Kriya acquired Duke University spin-out Warden Bio and its five investigational gene therapy programs for glycogen storage disorders that have no available treatments. Then in August, the company tapped Genzyme and Inozyme veteran Pedro Huertas as chief medical officer of the rare disease division.
Citing the “astronomically high” cost of manufacturing in the cell and gene therapy space, Ramaswamy said Kriya has internalized its manufacturing capabilities in its own GMP manufacturing facility in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.
“Kriya’s platform, the infrastructure, the technology that we’ve built, the team that we have, the access to capital, that really serves as a magnet to attract some of these really promising technologies and programs that we can then accelerate in our engine.”
