NATA awards £8M consortium funding to enhance the UK’s nucleic acid therapeutics delivery platforms
The Nucleic Acid Therapy Accelerator (NATA) today announces that it has awarded £8M to a consortium led by Professor Matthew Wood at the University of Oxford to develop new in vitro and in vivo methods of delivering oligonucleotide therapies.
Funded through NATA’s Delivery Challenge, the consortium is part of an overall £14M investment that NATA is making, with contributions from LifeArc, to overcome scientific challenges faced by the nucleic acid therapies field.
The Delivery Challenge seeks to develop novel methods to provide more effective targeting and delivery of oligonucleotides to the CNS, heart and muscle cells. These therapies have the potential to tackle rare and common diseases, including cancer, that arise in patients by allowing researchers to modify the expression of faulty genes that cause disease.
The University of Oxford consortium brings together a mix of leading academic and industrial partners including University College London, the MRC Toxicology Unit University of Cambridge, Mary Lyon Centre at MRC Harwell, the University of Massachusetts, King’s College London, the Rosalind Franklin Institute, the Karolinska Institute, Astra Zeneca, Ionis and Silence Therapeutics - all focused on overcoming the current constraints of delivering nucleic acid therapies.
Professor Nick Lench, NATA Executive Director said:
“We are thrilled to be working with the consortium led by the University of Oxford, that brings together world renowned experts in the field of nucleic acid therapy”
“We have now funded two consortia that, over the next 3-4 years, will significantly advance the field of oligonucleotide synthesis and delivery, this represents an important milestone for the UK scientific community and NATA”.