Annogen BV, a precision medicine company for the non-coding genome, signs research agreement with top tier pharma company.

PRESS RELEASE

Amsterdam, 30 November 2021

Under the agreement Annogen will use its proprietary SuRE™ technology to generate genome-wide regulatory profiles to identify disease-relevant regulatory activity and disease-relevant non-coding sequence variants.

Annogen performs functional annotation of the non-coding part of the genome on an unprecedented scale using its unique and proprietary SuRE™ technology. Using this technology, one can identify regulatory elements and functionally annotate non-coding sequence variants for entire genomes in a single experiment.

Current approaches in drug development generally referred to as ‘precision medicine’ aim to first understand the molecular basis of the disease and then to develop a targeted therapy which can arrest or reverse its progression. Over 95% of disease- and trait-related variants are found in the non-coding genome. However, to identify the important causal variants amongst the thousands of non-functional ones is a major challenge because for non-coding variants one cannot deduce functionality from sequence alone. SuRE™ screens provide a functional read-out for millions of non-coding variants in parallel, making it a valuable tool for drug discovery, target validation and pharmacogenomics.

Annogen aims to play a leading role in finding new therapeutic avenues through human non-coding genetics and identification of regulatory elements for cell therapy. Joris van Arensbergen, founder and CEO adds: “The interest of our customer is to uncover the regulatory elements as well as the importance of non-coding genetic variation in their disease-relevant cell-system. That makes it a perfect fit for our approach.”

At Annogen we use our SuRE™ technology to identify regulatory DNA elements to be used for controlled (therapeutic) gene expression. Also, we establish databases in which we functionally annotate millions of non-coding sequence variants for their effect on promoter and enhancer activity. This enables researchers to qualitatively interpret non-coding sequence variants in humans, animals and plants in the way we already can for coding sequence variants. For more information, please see our proof-of-concept study published in Nature Genetics https://rdcu.be/bH2xl where we annotate 6 million variants in 2 cell types.