The Barcelona biotech Splice Bio has signed a collaboration and licensing agreement with Spark Therapeutics, a US company owned by the Roche group, to develop a gene therapy aimed at a hereditary retinal disease.
Miquel Vila-Perelló, CEO and co-founder of SpliceBio, explained that the agreement provides for an initial payment, already made, and subsequent payments as the investigation progresses until reaching a maximum of 216 million dollars (205 million euros), and the payment of royalties when commercialized. The drug, he explained, is in the preclinical phase, so its arrival on the market will be delayed for several years.
Spark Therapeutics is the world leader in gene therapy for eye diseases, and the only company with a treatment on the market. The firm was acquired three years ago by Roche for $4.8 billion.
Vila-Perelló explained that this drug is not the most advanced that the group has, which has a gene therapy against Stargardt disease as its star drug. “We have developed a platform that allows us to treat diseases that until now could not be addressed with gene therapies because the necessary gene is too large to be administered by adeno-associated virus vectors,” she explained.
Splice Bio’s agreement with Spark is the most relevant reached in the Spanish biotech sector so far this year. “It is very important because it validates SpliceBio’s technology with the company that is now the leader in gene therapy in its sector,” said Jordi Xiol, partner of the management company Ysios Capital, one of the company’s shareholders. For Sylvain Sachot, partner of Asabys, another of the shareholders, it is a milestone for Spanish and Catalan biotech companies “because it shows that if they work well they can catch up with the world leaders, and their potential has no limits.”
Splice Bio was born in 2014 from a technology developed at Princeton University. Based in the Barcelona Science Park, it has tripled its workforce in just three years, to 30 workers. In 2022, the company starred in the largest “series A” round raised by a company in the sector in Spain, which contributed 50 million euros and gave entry to Novartis Venture Fund, the investment arm of the Swiss pharmaceutical multinational, in its shareholding; to the American funds UCB Ventures and Nea and the Dutch Gilde Healthcare, in addition to the Spanish Ysios and Asabys who had already entered the firm in 2020 in a seed capital round.