In this presentation, Kareem Reda, Chief Business Officer of ElevateBio, outlines the company’s mission to accelerate cell and gene therapy development through a comprehensive, end‑to‑end ecosystem. ElevateBio combines next‑generation genome‑editing tools (LifeEdit), well‑characterized iPSC lines, cell and vector engineering, and GMP manufacturing housed in its 140,000‑sq‑ft Basecamp facility in Waltham, MA, with a new expansion at the University of Pittsburgh. Reda emphasizes the company’s flexible partnership models—ranging from fee‑for‑service manufacturing agreements to licensing, co‑development, and equity‑free collaborations—citing examples such as a manufacturing partnership with TCR Squared, licensing of genome‑editing technology, and a joint venture with Boston Children’s Hospital and Dr. George Daley. He stresses that ElevateBio is built by drug developers for drug developers, offering talent, IP navigation, process development, and scalable GMP capabilities to help partners bring therapies to clinic more efficiently. The talk concludes with an invitation for potential partners, including large pharma, to engage with ElevateBio’s talent and infrastructure.
Chapters
Good afternoon. I'm Kareem Rida. I'm the Chief Business Officer at ElevateBio. ElevateBio is a cell and gene therapy technology company that was started and founded about 5 years ago with the vision of enabling the cell and gene therapy companies to kind of reimagine how these drugs get developed and built. And our goal is to enable our partners to build their therapies more effectively and more efficiently, driving more therapies into the clinic. So everyone in this room, and by being here at Meeting on the Mesa, You're probably well aware, as I think all the previous presentations have mentioned, just how many challenges there are in cell and gene therapy. Drug development is hard, and probably we've picked the hardest version of drug development in our space. But the medicines are transformative and the patients deserve our best. And so there's no straight path. And this was Our founder, Mitch Feiner, having been CSO at Bluebird, having spent years creating and advising companies, found himself, just like all of us in this room, facing the same challenges over and over and over again. You build, you've got a great idea, you have a really interesting piece of cellular biology that you'd like to pursue, and how to get the best of our ideas to patients. And it starts with assembling talent, navigating complex IP fields and licenses, building these capabilities in process development, and trying to translate that eventually into achieving quality and then scalable CGMP manufacturing. So this sinuous path is one that we've all faced, and in any new modality is is pretty par for the course. But at ElevateBio, we've created what we believe is a first-of-its-kind ecosystem to accelerate the design, manufacturing, and development of cell and gene therapies. We combined our enabling technologies, next-generation genome editing, RGNs and base editors, cell protein vector engineering capability, and GMP iPSCs. These are the backbone of core enabling technologies that allow us to develop, to allow us to allow our partners to develop their programs. And then when you couple that with process innovation and process science, and then the infrastructure and the capability to manufacture those programs in a GMP facility, we really have brought together and straightened out this path to delivering therapies to the clinic, again, more effectively and more efficiently and with the right kind of expertise. ElevateBio is built by drug developers for drug developers. So I want to, as the chief business officer, I want to take a moment to talk about partnering. Unsurprisingly, we get asked a lot of, as to whether you need ElevateBio needs to have equity in order for people to gain access to our ecosystem, and the answer is No, we do not. People do not. We have, you know, of the dozen or so partnerships we've signed this year, the vast minority of them have an equity component. We do have tremendous flexibility in the way we partner, but really we are trying to match our partnership model to fit the science and the technology needs and the support that our partners need. So it's the right partnership at the right time. I'll go through a couple of examples on this slide of partnerships we've done, and there's a couple more later in the presentation. But we have, and it's announced by the company TCR Squared, a long-term, long-term manufacturing partnership with TCR Squared. And that is, you know, just We don't own any equity in the company, and so that is just a standard manufacturing agreement. We have done with BCH a partnership to seed and develop new companies, and there's an example of that at the end of the presentation. We've done licensing of our genome editing technology for use in cell therapy. So cell therapy, Companies are exploring next generation, and genome editing is a core component of bringing next generation cell therapies. And we've done, you know, very standard traditional licensing. And then we also have comprehensive R&D partnerships for de novo product development. So it spans a really broad range. And of course, not every company is seeking the full ecosystem. But we believe almost any company could benefit from tapping into either some portion or even potentially the more comprehensive ecosystem of technology platforms and process development and manufacturing capability that we've built at ElevateBio. So where are we found? Where can you find all this innovation? At our 140,000-square-foot facility just outside of Boston in Waltham, Massachusetts. Basecamp is our first GMP facility. We have cell and viral vector suites. Our R&D, our process development, our QC laboratories are all located there. And it's truly an end-to-end innovation center. Basecamp, our manufacturing company within the ElevateBio portfolio, has developed its own platform processes for CAR and TCR cell therapies, suspension-based lenti, high titer lenti, and AAV. And these are platforms that companies can tap into and, you know, get their program moving forward faster. And then really world-class process development And it's a state-of-the-art facility. So we encourage you to come visit us, or, you know, we've learned from COVID we can still do virtual tours as well for those who are not in Boston or are not visiting. One piece of news from the summer, at the end of August, we announced our expansion, expanding our footprint to the University of Pittsburgh in partnership there. We will open another base camp. And Pittsburgh, enabled through the R.K. Mellon Foundation, had a $100 million grant to attract biomanufacturing to Pittsburgh. And when the university was looking for a partner, they didn't just want a service provider, someone who was going to build GMP space. They wanted someone who was going to build next generation, who's going to bring next generation technologies process development, process science, who was going to invest in the future of cell and gene therapies. And so that is why ElevateBio is partnered and expanding our footprint to Pittsburgh. Along with the GMP manufacturing capabilities, we offer our partners a range of enabling technologies. This includes LifeEdit, our genome editing, our wholly owned genome editing company. Our iPSCs, well-characterized iPSC cell lines, process development and scale-up, and then cell and vector engineering capability. And so when you think about the Venn diagram of all of these things, you can kind of puzzle piece together how many different modalities we can work on and enable for our partners. So LifeEdit is our wholly owned Genome editing subsidiary. These novel nucleases were selected for having a diverse PAM that really allows us broad genome access. They're also small size. They were filtered for small size, which should facilitate delivery. This unique capability, and we have multiple transfer-ready nucleases and base editing, really allows us to achieve the LifeEdit vision of any edit anywhere, whether it's knockout, insertion, repair, base editing. And Jane is here representing LifeEdit. And if you have genome editing needs, you should speak with her. Also this summer, we were very busy this summer. We announced a new co— so this is what I alluded to with Boston Children's Hospital and Dr. George Daley, who's Dean of the Harvard Medical School. The paper is really cool and you should all read it. For me, what was really cool is that it was our technology platforms, our manufacturing capabilities, and our whole ecosystem and the talent at ElevateBio that drew George Daley to us. He had multiple choices in terms of how he was going to build this iPSC-derived allogeneic immune cell company and the vision of being able to tap into our ecosystem and build that company in a different way than you usually would, it was one of the core attractants. Now, you know, Elevate, you know, at ElevateBio, this is one of our portfolio companies. We're heavily involved in this. That's probably not true for most of this audience, and yet I still think it's extremely relevant because thinking about the way you're building the company and rethinking whether or not building your own process development and GMP, thinking of whether you have to build your own iPSC cell line, those are tough choices historically because the capability like ElevateBio has not existed until now. And so we think the future of of company building will be heavily influenced by the ability to have, again, a capable and proven group by your side in the drug development journey. So I mentioned a dozen-plus partners this year. If we tally up the other partners from previous years, we touch a lot of different areas. These are all programs that the breadth of our experience allows us to deliver for our partners. And so we're working, you know, whether it's vector manufacturing or cell manufacturing or implementing our proprietary technologies, iPSCs or genome editing for our partners, we're doing it in a variety of different ways across a variety of different cell types, T cells, B cells, Tregs. And of course, that will only continue to expand as we work with more and more groups. This is the last slide. What I want to leave you with is that our model enables us to have multiple avenues for partnerships where people can come and leverage the talent and capability at ElevateBio. And again, from a BD perspective, I'm really committed and my whole team is to finding the right partnership at the right time. And that can be as simple as, you know, fee for service in our process development and manufacturing, you know, licensing of technology that look, you know, pretty similar to anything you'd like, or one or more of those things, or the full kit and caboodle from a company building perspective, from a, equity perspective or from a co-development perspective. And if there are large pharmas in the room, we also talk not just to potential sort of customers, partners, but also to the larger pharmas in the room where we can really do drug development start to finish. So that kind of innovation, we're very excited about. We spent 5 years building and we really feel like we're just getting started. So there's about a minute 30 left if there's any questions. Okay. I will be for about 20 to 25 minutes outside of the ballroom if people want to talk.
