ViaCyte, a regenerative medicine company long backed by CIRM, announced a partnership with CRISPR Therapeutics to increase the number of people with Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) who could benefit from their PEC-Direct therapeutic implant.

Last year, CIRM granted ViaCyte $20 million to facilitate development of PEC-Direct, a device that both transplants pancreatic progenitor stem cells (the immature version of  islet cells, the insulin-producing cells that are destroyed in TID), and allows those cells to connect to the patient’s bloodstream to help them function more like normal islet cells. This treatment, currently in clinical trials, was initially targeted towards high risk patients because of the need to treat them with immunosuppressive therapy, to ensure that the patient’s immune system does not attack the implanted cells.

ViaCyte’s partnership with CRISPR Therapeutics aims to eliminate the need for immunosuppressive therapy by engineering the transplanted stem cells to evade the immune system prior to implanting in the patient. CRISPR Therapeutics is already using this gene editing approach in CAR-T based cancer therapies and has developed an important knowledge base in “immune-evasive gene editing.” Paul Laikind Ph.D., CEO and President of ViaCyte explains the importance of this partnership in a news release:

“Creating an immune-evasive gene-edited version of our technology would enable us to address a larger patient population than we could with a product requiring immunosuppression. CRISPR Therapeutics is the ideal partner for this program given their leading gene editing technology and expertise and focus on immune-evasive editing.”

Samarth Kulkarni, Ph.D., and CEO of CRISPR Therapeutics adds:

“We believe the combination of regenerative medicine and gene editing has the potential to offer durable, curative therapies to patients in many different diseases, including common chronic disorders like insulin-requiring diabetes.”

The hope is that this new approach could make this treatment available to everyone with T1D. The benefits of such a treatment option would be considerable as TID affects around 1.25 million Americans, and can lead to severe health complications such as kidney damage and heart disease. The initial goals of this collaboration are to develop a stem cell line that successfully evades the immune system, followed by developing a product that can be used in patients.