19 Dec 2019 - Carmine Therapeutics is proud to announce that it has won the Bristol-Myers Squibb’s 2019 Golden Ticket for LabCentral. LabCentral is an innovative shared laboratory space designed as a launchpad for life sciences and biotech startups. As a platinum sponsor of LabCentral, Bristol-Myers Squibb can select up to two innovative life sciences and biotech startup companies per year of active sponsorship for “Golden Tickets,” which underwrite the cost of one lab bench for one year in LabCentral’s Kendall Square facility.
Among a pool of competitive new biotechnologies, Carmine Therapeutics and STIMIT were selected as the top promising early stage life sciences companies.
Carmine Therapeutics is pioneering a new class of genetic medicines based on red blood cell extracellular vesicles (RBCEVs) as redosable allogeneic therapies. These homogeneous, non-immunogenic, and stable vesicles can be exogenously engineered, at scale, without culture expansion, to carry large nucleic acid payloads (at least 11 kilobases), and surface functionalized with targeting ligands to increase bioavailability in specific tissues and cell types. This technology, published in Nature Communications, forms the foundation of Carmine's fully modular and robust REGENT™ platform that aims to revolutionize nucleic acid therapies.
"Nucleic acid therapeutics will take center stage in the 21st century, however their delivery has been a huge technical challenge. The beauty of Carmine's REGENT platform is that we are able to harvest large quantities of extracellular vesicles very economically, and load them with nucleic acid payloads to be delivered to various sites in the body, overcoming several limitations of today's gene therapy vehicles. We are privileged to be awarded the BMS Golden Ticket to LabCentral, to work alongside the best biotech startups in the world and embark on this journey to revolutionize gene therapies." - VP of Discovery, Dr. Ronne Yeo.
“Golden Tickets afford promising early stage life sciences companies the opportunity to explore and develop their ideas in a deeply collaborative environment,” said Johannes Fruehauf, M.D., Ph.D., co-founder and president, LabCentral. "The selected winners, STIMIT and Carmine Therapeutics, are creating novel technologies at the cutting-edge of advanced drug delivery platforms and we, at LabCentral, look forward to supporting them in reaching their next milestones. We are pleased to welcome Carmine to our community and to congratulate them and STIMIT both on receiving the Bristol-Myers Squibb Golden Ticket.”
About Bristol-Myers Squibb
Bristol-Myers Squibb is a global biopharmaceutical company whose mission is to discover, develop and deliver innovative medicines that help patients prevail over serious diseases.
About LabCentral
LabCentral is a first-of-its-kind shared laboratory workspace in the heart of the Kendall Square, Cambridge, biotech innovation hub, designed as a launchpad for high-potential life-sciences and biotech startups. It offers everything young companies need to begin lab operations immediately upon move-in and propel their science forward faster and more cost-efficiently. This includes: beautifully designed, fully permitted lab and office space, first-class facility and administrative support, skilled laboratory personnel, peer learning and networking opportunities, an expert speaker series — as well as critical access to potential funders and industry partners. A private, nonprofit institution, its first site opened in 2013, with support from real-estate partner, MIT. Founding sponsors include Johnson & Johnson Innovation, the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, Roche, and Triumvirate Environmental. To accommodate demand for growing startups, LabCentral expanded its original site to double the original size in the fall of 2017, and, with support from Pfizer, opened LabCentral 610 at the end of the year. LabCentral now has capacity to serve a total of ~450 scientists and entrepreneurs in about 70 companies across its two-building campus. In 2017, it also added the LabCentral Learning Lab for STEM programming to help inspire the next generation of science entrepreneurs.
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