Selecta Biosciences is a biopharmaceutical company developing novel therapeutic and prophylactic vaccines and immunotherapeutics to treat and prevent disease. Its platforms use proprietary synthetic self assembling nanoparticles that enable rational vaccine design. This unique rational vaccine design creates a new paradigm in vaccine and immunotherapeutic development, enabling completely new therapeutic applications while offering the potential of improved efficacy and safety profiles.
Selecta’s fully synthetic engineering of novel vaccines offers a number of compelling benefits, including flexible modular vaccine design and simplified manufacturing. Avoiding the challenges and costs of the complex biological production and regulatory processes, Selecta’s vaccines can be developed faster to clinic and market for the following reasons:
Selecta’s synthetic nanoparticles are self assembling, enabling robust and rapid production.
Manufacturing is scalable and relies on established pharmaceutical equipment and processes used for numerous approved products.
Selecta optimizes the efficacy and safety of its products through a series of design variations in a reliable design process that is analogous to structure activity relation analysis used in small molecule research.
The technology is flexible to enable diverse vaccines and immunotherapeutics, and the company has created nanoparticle-based synthetic vaccines using a wide array of bioactive compounds, including small molecules, peptides, oligosaccharides, and proteins. Because its products can target both humoral and cellular pathways of the immune system, Selecta is pursuing a broad range of therapeutic applications, including cancer, autoimmune diseases, infectious diseases, and addiction. Building on the company’s novel approach, Selecta’s product candidates have the potential to become first-in-class or best-in-class therapeutics to treat and prevent diseases.
The company platforms are built upon on groundbreaking discoveries in immunobiology and nanotechnology by the three scientific pioneers who founded the company. The company’s broad and powerful product platform brings together the advanced nanoparticle technology of Professors Robert Langer (MIT) and Omid Farokhzad (Harvard Medical School), two leaders in the fields of targeted nanotechnology, combined with leading insights into the workings of the immune system made by Professor Ulrich von Andrian (Harvard Medical School), a recognized expert in the field of immunology.
Selecta is backed by leading venture investors including Polaris Venture Partners, Flagship Ventures, NanoDimension, OrbiMed Advisors and Leukon Investments. The company’s intellectual property portfolio consists of a broad patent estate of issued patents, pending patent applications, and proprietary know-how covering vaccine nanoparticles, targeted delivery, controlled-release polymer systems, novel adjuvants, novel antigens, and nanoparticle formulation and processing for therapeutic and prophylactic vaccines and immunotherapeutics.