Acuitas Therapeutics to Present Oral Session and Posters on LNPs at ASGCT 2025
Among the new data the company plans to show in its presentations is the successful, repeated dosing of an mRNA-LNP in monkeys.
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Acuitas Therapeutics, headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, has announced titles and abstracts for an oral presentation and two posters the company will be showing at the annual meeting of the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy (ASGCT) (1). ASGCT 2025 will be held from May 13–17, 2025 in New Orleans.
Acuitas is a biotechnology company that was integral to the development of the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines, in which its lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) were used; the company has since developed dozens of next-generation LNPs that are used in both the bio/pharmaceutical industry and academia in a wide range of applications, from metabolic diseases to personalized therapies (1,2).
The new data that Acuitas plans to show in its ASGCT presentations centers around the successful, repeated dosing of a messenger RNA (mRNA) LNP in monkeys, as well as continuing work on LNP delivery beyond the liver, including an expanded potential for innovative therapeutic modalities such as chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies (1,2).
The oral presentation, “Pharmacodynamic Activity, Pharmacokinetics, and Tolerability of Lipid Nanoparticle Formulation of mRNA Following Repeated Intravenous Dosing in Monkeys,” will be given on Thursday, May 15. One poster, “Improved T Cell Delivery and Expression of mRNA Using CD8-Targeted Lipid Nanoparticles with Athebody Designed Ankyrin Repeat Proteins (DARPins)” (#667), will be shown during the Tuesday, May 13 session; the other, “Delivery, Potency, and Tolerability of Lipid Nanoparticle Formulations of mRNA in PXB-Mice” (#1164), will be displayed on Wednesday, May 14 (1).
In November 2023, Acuitas was announced as one of the founding members of the Alliance for mRNA Medicines, launched at that fall’s edition of the International mRNA Health Conference in Berlin (3). Just prior to that, Thomas D. Madden, PhD, president and CEO of Acuitas, spoke with Pharmaceutical Technology® Groupabout the potential of mRNA as it related to his company’s future work (4). At the time, Acuitas had just entered into a technology transfer agreement with BIOVECTRA, through which Acuitas’ LNP technology platform for manufacturing mRNA-based therapeutics would be transferred to a BIOVECTRA biomanufacturing center being built on Prince Edward Island (5).
“This whole field is extremely vibrant at the moment,” Madden said in October 2023 (4). “There's a lot of nascent science that is moving towards the clinical. I think it's going to be a very exciting time over the next several years, particularly as we get more clinical data coming out, hopefully confirming the earlier studies demonstrating the utility of gene editing in particular applications.”
Abstracts for ASGCT 2025 are now publicly available, and accessible through the ASGCT website (6).
References
1. Acuitas Therapeutics. Acuitas Therapeutics to Present Data on Latest LNP Safety and Activity Profiles at ASGCT 2025. Press Release. April 24, 2025.
2. Comments received via email correspondence on April 29, 2025.
3. Spivey, C. Alliance for mRNA Medicines Officially Launched in Germany. BioPharmInternational.com, Nov. 6, 2023.
4. Spivey, C. Exploring mRNA’s Potential. PharmTech.com, Oct. 17, 2023.
5. BIOVECTRA. BIOVECTRA Signs Service Agreement with Acuitas Therapeutics for Unique Lipid Nanoparticle (LNP) Delivery System Used in Manufacturing mRNA-Based Therapies. Press Release. Oct. 5, 2023.
6. American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy. ASGCT Annual Meeting. annualmeeting.asgct.org (accessed April 29, 2025).
