Selecta lays off 25% of employees after strategic review

Selecta Biosciences, which is developing immunotherapies and gene therapies, is cutting its workforce by 25% and pausing development of its wholly-owned gene therapy programs.

The company announced the workforce reduction and a clinical trial pause on Thursday during its first-quarter earnings report, saying the actions would extend the biotech’s cash runway into the first half of 2025.

It now plans to focus on the in-licensing deal it struck with Sobi in 2020 for its gout candidate, and advancing its precision immune tolerance platform.

Carsten Brunn

“Together with our boards, we recently conducted a strategic review to focus our resources on key programs, where we believe we have the highest potential to succeed,” Selecta CEO Carsten Brunn said during the earnings call.

The company had roughly $136.2 million in cash, equivalents, restricted cash and marketable securities at the end of 2022, according to SEC filings.

Selecta CFO Blaine Davis told Endpoints News via email that the reduction affects 15 people across the company.

“We are scaling back our organization appropriately to effectively support our priority programs and streamlined operations,” Davis said in the email.

The company said it will halt further development of its in-house gene therapy programs, including two preclinical studies and a Phase I/II trial for an AAV gene therapy to methylmalonic acidemia, a metabolism disorder.

Selecta “always intended to partner our gene therapy programs,” Brunn said Thursday.

The company plans to move forward with its partnership with Sobi, which shelled out $100 million to in-license Selecta’s candidate, SEL-212, for chronic refractory gout in 2020. In March, Sobi reported positive Phase III data, where two trials met the primary endpoint. The partners are planning to file a BLA in H1 next year.

Additionally, Selecta said it will prioritize developing ImmTOR-IL, a combination of Selecta’s ImmTOR platform with IL-2. The plan is to start IND-enabling studies this year and initially look at the combination in liver diseases.

gene therapy
biotech