Novel scaffold proteins for improved drug loading published by Evox co-founder
Oxford, UK, August 9, 2023 – Evox Therapeutics Ltd (‘Evox’), a leading exosome therapeutics company, today announced the publication in Nature Communications of Evox-funded research identifying novel exosome scaffold proteins that significantly improve drug loading into exosomes for therapeutic purposes. The publication can be accessed at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-40453-0.
In the publication, the authors screened and characterised 244 potential scaffold proteins for their ability to enable robust drug sorting and loading into exosomes. 24 proteins showed robust sorting ability across five different exosome-producing cell types with many of these scaffold proteins being reported for the first time. Amongst the most potent are the novel tetraspanin scaffold proteins TSPAN2 and TSPAN3. These novel scaffolds were extremely versatile and could be used to load a wide range of drug cargos either onto the surface or inside exosomes.
The research provides further evidence of the underlying strength of Evox’s proprietary exosome engineering platform. Evox has pioneered the use of proteins that are naturally highly expressed in exosomes to act as scaffolds for attaching and loading genetic medicines into exosomes. These new scaffold proteins have the potential to significantly enhance the quantity of drug cargoes, such as AAV and genome editing enzymes, that can be loaded inside exosomes.
“The discovery and characterisation of these novel scaffolds proprietary to Evox provides a new platform for exosome-based engineering and represents a 5-10-fold improvement over previously identified exosome scaffolds,” said Dr. Antonin de Fougerolles, Chief Executive Officer of Evox. “This publication along with several more planned for later this year serve to highlight our world leading exosome engineering platform DeliverEX® and the advances we are making in non-viral drug delivery of genetic medicines.”
About Evox Therapeutics
Evox Therapeutics is a privately held, Oxford-based biotechnology company that is a leader in harnessing and engineering the natural delivery capabilities of extracellular vesicles (EVs), known as exosomes, to develop an entirely new class of therapeutics for the treatment of life-threatening diseases. Evox uses its proprietary DeliverEX® technology to engineer exosomes to facilitate drug delivery to organs of interest. Exosome-based drugs have the potential to address some of the limitations of genetic medicines such as gene therapy and genome editing by enabling safe non-immunogenic repeated delivery to cells and tissues that are currently out of reach using other drug delivery technologies. Evox is backed by leading life sciences venture capital groups, including Redmile and OrbiMed, and is supported by a comprehensive intellectual property portfolio.