Harvard technology to be commercialized by Vesigen Therapeutics
Harvard University’s Office of Technology Development (OTD) and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health today announced the launch of Vesigen Therapeutics, a startup company that aims to overcome the challenge of delivering next-generation therapeutics, such as gene-editing complexes, RNA molecules, and other large proteins, to intracellular targets in specific tissues of interest. Through an exclusive license agreement with Harvard, Vesigen will develop and commercialize novel drug-delivery technologies that originated in the lab of Quan Lu, professor of environmental genetics and physiology at the Harvard Chan School. In Lu’s lab, what began as a basic biological study of how cells communicate with each other ended up pointing, “completely unexpectedly,” to a new way of creating tiny, mobile capsules that efficiently direct therapeutic molecules to the cells where they’re needed. Support from Harvard’s Blavatnik Biomedical Accelerator enabled Lu’s research team at the Harvard Chan School to conduct validating studies and advance...