J&J bolsters CAR-T goals with Serotiny acquisition

While details of the deal remain undisclosed, Serotiny confirmed the acquisition in a statement and outlined how the firm will “continue to advance its mission to discover new engineered multi-domain proteins for application-tailored CGTs across a broad spectrum of therapeutic applications.”

California-based Serotiny is a preclinical discovery company, which aims to create “better” CGTs using therapeutic multi-domain proteins (tMDP), such as chimeric antigen receptor (CARs), accessory proteins and gene editing systems, and alternative CARs.

The firm said its discovery platform is “at the heart” of Serotiny and it is used to engineer large and typically unstructured multi-domain proteins to control mammalian cells in which they are expressed. The company then encodes these constraints into its platform to manufacture a scaled design-construct-test-learn process that can take advantage of different disciplinary approaches.

J&J is familiar with Serotiny with the firm being located within the JLABS incubator in South San Francisco, California – a J&J owned campus housing numerous biotech start-ups. Additionally, in June 2022, in an agreement facilitated by J&J innovation, Serotiny collaborated with Janssen Biotech (a J&J company) to optimize CAR designs for cellular therapy.

The partnership brought together the company’s tMDP mining and design capabilities with Janssen’s antibody advancement and cell therapy knowledge to create CAR-based cell therapies.

J&J is already one of the major players in the chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell space. The firm and its partner Legend Biotech received US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for Carvykti (ciltacabtagene autoleucel), a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy to treat white blood cell cancer in March 2022.

Since then, the firm has heavily invested in the modality. In May 2023, J&J partnered with Chinese company Cellular Biomedicine Group (CBMG) to advance, produce and commercialize CAR-T cell therapies for the treatment of B-cell malignancies for an upfront payment of $245 million.