Touchlight receives grant to advance rapid, scalable and thermostable doggybone DNA vaccine platform

• Funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will build on preclinical data showing the potential of nanoparticle-formulated doggybone DNA to deliver strong antibody titres and strong T cell responses.

Hampton, UK – 29 November 2022 – Touchlight, a biotechnology company pioneering enzymatic DNA production to enable the genetic medicine revolution, is furthering pre-clinical development of its proprietary doggybone DNA vaccine platform, financed by a new grant received from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The program aims to build on evidence that Touchlight’s rapid enzymatic doggybone DNA vaccines can produce strong neutralising antibodies and durable T cell responses following vaccine administration in nanoparticles. As part of the grant, Touchlight will also be investigating the performance of doggybone DNA for therapeutic monoclonal antibody production.

Successful demonstration of the doggybone DNA platform’s effectiveness in DNA vaccine and gene therapy applications has the potential to support the global availability of innovative medicines and to further the application of the doggybone platform in enabling rapid pandemic response.

Karen Fallen, CEO of Touchlight, commented: “This grant is further evidence of the potential of our doggybone DNA platform. We are excited to start the program, which could potentially demonstrate that the doggybone DNA platform can support a rapid, scalable, durable and thermostable vaccine solution for future pandemic response.”

Touchlight’s enzymatic approach enables the rapid and scalable DNA manufacture in a significantly smaller footprint than can be achieved with fermentation-based processes. In addition, it eliminates antibiotic-resistance genes that could be present in plasmid DNA, improving safety.

Touchlight’s core focus is to enable genetic medicine by providing Contract Development and Manufacturing (CDMO) services to genetic medicine manufacturers, and doggybone DNA is already widely utilised across the genetic medicine market, in areas such as critical starting material for viral vector and mRNA vaccine production, genome editing and DNA vaccine applications.

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About Touchlight

Touchlight is a privately-owned CDMO based in London, U.K., focused on the provision of DNA services and manufacture of enzymatically produced doggybone DNA (dbDNA™) to enable the development of genetic medicines. Touchlight provide rapid, enzymatic DNA development and manufacturing for all advanced therapy production, including mRNA, viral and non-viral gene therapy and DNA API. dbDNA is a minimal, linear, covalently closed structure, which eliminates bacterial sequences. Touchlight’s revolutionary enzymatic production platform enables unprecedented speed, scale, and the ability to target genes with a size and complexity that is impossible with current technologies. Clients can be supported from pre-clinical through development and supply, to licencing and tech transfer for use in-house.

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