Novo Nordisk inks research deal with RNA startup with new delivery approach

Novo Nordisk is collaborating with RNA upstart Eleven Therapeutics in a bid to identify new medicines that can deliver nucleic acids.

The deal, announced Monday morning, will utilize Eleven’s platform, dubbed “DELiveri,” to identify potential molecules that can deliver nucleic acid therapeutics to treat undisclosed cardiometabolic diseases. It gives Novo exclusive access to certain cell types and applications that are associated with the platform, according to a press release. Financial details were not disclosed.

Eleven has offices in Tel Aviv, Cambridge, MA, and Cambridge, UK. It was founded in 2020 and last year raised $22 million in seed financing, including $9 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Iris Grossman

Iris Grossman, the biotech’s chief therapeutics officer, told Endpoints News on Monday that Eleven’s focus has been on RNA delivery and developing therapies that can modify cells to generate peptides and proteins for chronic diseases, using knowledge from the siRNA and antisense oligonucleotide (ASO) field.

In short, the biotech has created a “molecular radar” as an alternative to GalNAc, a sugar discovered in the 1960s that binds to a receptor on the liver. Alnylam utilizes GalNAc as a conjugate for some of its medicines, including Oxlumo, Amvuttra, Givlaari and Leqvio.

As part of the Novo partnership, Eleven’s platform will be used to screen millions of candidates at a time and engineer them with what Grossman called a “genetic circuit.”

If a candidate that Eleven develops works, the molecule generates a readout — but only if the candidate gets into the cell and is available in the cytoplasm.

“It solves both for activity and specificity, which have been an issue for all the prior efforts to do high throughput screening,” Grossman said.

Grossman said the deal with Novo could expand over time to include other types of modalities and perhaps platforms.

Back in 2021, Novo spent $3.3 billion to acquire Dicerna, which has been developing RNAi medicines.

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