RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) boosts biological drugs March 12, 2024 - Merck & Co. (MSD) has signed up the decades-old, pre-clinical, start-up company Pearl Bio’s synthetic biology platform, offering up to $1 billion in biobucks for potential cancer biologics.
The hook-up was for Pearl Bio's number of broad-blocking patents giving Pearl the exclusive right to encode synthetic amino acids using engineered synthetases and translation machinery to drive multi-site incorporation of synthetic amino acids and other building blocks with site-specificity at high yield and purity. -
No products exist - just a patent blocking play and a work in progress. Pearl Bio co-founder Amy Cayne Schwartz thinks this technology is poised to overcome a lot of the shortcomings of current biologics on the market: “For example, optimizing the drug-antibody ratio has been a defining challenge because when you attach the drug to natural amino acid residues, you are limited in the number and specific location since multiple lysines, for example, are found in a given protein and are critical for its function. Thus, approaches that attach to natural amino acids are constrained, lead to heterogeneous products, and typically ablate protein function. By contrast, Pearl can attach up to 50 synthetic amino acids at monomeric precision to tune therapeutic properties while preserving protein sequence and function.”
Such precision enables the programmability of a therapeutic window with a half-life of up to three weeks to address specific disease indications or patient populations. “With this, we have the opportunity to advance both best-in-class and first-in-class therapeutics to address critical unmet needs and solve challenges plaguing the biologics industry,” says Schwartz.
https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/merck-bets-1-billion-pearls-smart-biomaterial-jewels