Prime Medicine, Cimeo announce research collaboration

Prime Medicine and Cimeio Therapeutics announced a research collaboration to combine their respective technologies, including Prime Medicine’s Prime Editing platform and Cimeio’s Shielded Cell and Immunotherapy Pairs platform. The goal of the research is to improve the safety and effectiveness of hematopoietic stem cell transplants to treat genetic diseases, acute myeloid leukemia, and myelodysplastic syndrome, as well as enable the in vivo selection of edited HSCs to potentially remove the need for transplantation entirely. Under the terms of the agreement, Prime Medicine will develop a Prime Editor for Cimeio’s CD117 shielding variant that will then be evaluated by both companies. CD117 is a receptor tyrosine kinase expressed on normal HSCs and on leukemia cells, and therefore is an attractive target for an antibody-based conditioning therapy for patients needing a stem cell transplant, or for patients with AML or MDS needing new treatment options.