Sensible Biotechnologies: Engineering cells to make better mRNA 🧬

At Sensible Bio, we are turning living cells into cost-efficient factories for manufacturing high-quality mRNA to unlock the full potential of mRNA therapeutics and vaccines.

tl;dr

Messenger RNA (mRNA) is a promising biological platform for both vaccines and therapeutics. Today, all mRNA is synthesised via cell-free processes, which are expensive, cumbersome, and cannot produce mRNA with sufficient quality for many of its promising clinical applications. We engineer cells to produce high-quality mRNA in a scalable and cost-efficient fashion to meet the growing demand for mRNA in novel vaccines and therapies.

The Problem: Cell-free mRNA manufacturing

Currently, mRNA production completely relies on In Vitro Transcription (IVT), a cell-free process involving numerous proprietary and expensive enzymes and reagents. This method also requires multiple intricate steps, laborious purification procedures, and cannot be scaled to large reaction volumes.

Importantly, IVT-based mRNA manufacturing generates highly immunogenic double-stranded RNA (dsRNA), which is posing risks in some of the most important applications of mRNA such as in gene editing and cancer. Moreover, it is difficult to produce and purify long mRNA sequences via IVT; this creates major obstacles for other promising mRNA modalities like self-amplifying mRNAs, which could significantly reduce the high amounts of mRNA needed for many of its therapeutic applications.

To truly unleash the power of mRNA more efficient, affordable, and effective mRNA manufacturing methods are needed.

The Solution: Cell-free mRNA manufacturing (not done)

We are utilizing the processes in the living cells, which have been producing high-quality mRNA for millions of years. By combining natural cellular processes with cell engineering, we build a scalable platform to produce high-quality mRNA cost-effectively.

Our platform enables the production of longer mRNA, while addressing the problem of immunogenic double-stranded RNA inherent in IVT.

By removing the need for expensive and proprietary reagents, we enable cost-effective mRNA manufacturing and improve access to mRNA technology. Also, the scalability of cell-based mRNA production strengthens biosecurity and supply chain resilience.

Our objective is to become a partner for all pharma and biotech companies striving to produce the next generation of mRNA therapies and vaccines.

The Platform

Our platform combines the principles of cell engineering, computational biology and precision fermentation. We exploit and optimise the selective packaging of the mRNA of interest into specific protein complexes. This enables a specific encapsulation of mRNA, prevents mRNA contamination and simplifies its downstream processing.

Team

Sensible Bio was founded in August 2021 by Miroslav Gasparek (CEO) and Dr Marian Kupculak (CSO).

Miro holds a Bioengineering degree from Imperial College London and conducted research at Imperial College, Caltech and Stanford. He worked with several TechBio VCs and advised public and private institutions in Central Europe on life science R&D. Miro also advised the Slovak Ministry of Health and the Board Member of the World Health Organization on biosecurity and innovation.

Marian has a PhD in Molecular Biology from Oxford, where he focused on genetic engineering and cancer. He has more than 9 years of full-time wet-lab experience with cellular engineering. He has worked at the leading European research centres, including the University of Oxford, the University of Gothenburg, and Vienna BioCenter.

Our leadership includes the global leaders in mRNA manufacturing, as well as in clinical development and strategy. We also assembled a fantastic team of bioengineers and scientists from across the globe.

Traction

Using our proprietary technology we have demonstrated the capability to produce the mRNA. Additionally, we have secured a major co-development partnership with Ginkgo Bioworks. We also set up collaborations with leading research institutions across the globe. Sensible Biotechnologies has established lab operations in Oxford, United Kingdom and Bratislava, Slovakia. We have obtained 10 Letters of Intent for our mRNA from the biotech companies and research groups that would like to test it.

Our scientific advisory board includes world-leading synthetic biology, mRNA manufacturing, and clinical experts and our mentors include the top life science executives.

Our investors include specialist TechBio funds and leading biotech executives investing as angels.

We're excited to be working on unlocking the full potential of mRNA technology. Are you interested? Get in touch at info@sensible.bio.

Do you want to build the platform for making better mRNA with us? Drop us an email at careers@sensible.bio We are hiring synthetic biologists, bioprocess engineers, mRNA Quality Control experts, RNA computational biologists, and machine learning engineers.