Why promoter design is no longer just an expression checkbox, it’s the key to therapeutic endurance:
Advanced therapies Why promoter design is no longer just an expression checkbox, it’s the key…
28 January 2026
Partnership brings together JURA’s variational synthesis platform and Annogen’s SuRE™ technology to unlock new possibilities for safer, more effective advanced therapies
BOSTON, MA and AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS — JURA Bio, a biotechnology company pioneering manufacturing-aware generative AI for therapeutic discovery, and Annogen, a leader in tailored gene expression engineering for safer and more effective therapies, today announced a research collaboration to explore the application of variational synthesis for the design of cell-type specific regulatory DNA elements.
The collaboration addresses a fundamental challenge in the development of advanced therapies: achieving precise control over when and where therapeutic genes are expressed. Regulatory elements such as promoters and enhancers serve as the natural switches of gene expression, and the ability to design these elements with high specificity for target tissues and cell types while minimizing activity in off-target tissues represents a critical step toward therapies that are both more effective and safer for patients.
Under the collaboration, JURA will apply its proprietary variational synthesis technology to design high-complexity libraries of novel regulatory sequences guided by Annogen’s deep learning models trained on genome-wide functional data with billions of measure points obtained from Annogen’s proprietary SuRE™ platform. Annogen will subsequently leverage its SuRE™ platform to functionally validate these designs across multiple cell types and identify the most promising candidates for further development.
“This collaboration represents an exciting convergence of two platforms that are each pushing the boundaries of what is possible in therapeutic development,” said Elizabeth Wood, PhD, Founder and CEO of JURA Bio. “Variational synthesis allows us to explore sequence space at a scale that was previously unimaginable, and by combining this capability with Annogen’s expertise in functional genomics, we can now design and test regulatory elements that may prove superior to anything evolution has produced.”
“We believe this collaboration could fill an important gap between low cost random sequence synthesis and high cost defined sequence synthesis, enabling the exploration of a substantially larger space of relevant sequences. This may ultimately improve our deep learning models and regulatory element design ” said Joris van Arensbergen, PhD, Founder and CEO of Annogen.
Survey of Regulatory Elements (SuRE™) is a massively parallel reporter assay developed by Annogen that enables the functional characterization of millions of DNA sequences in a single experiment. The technology works by associating millions of DNA fragments, each with redundant, unique barcodes, and then measuring which fragments drive gene expression when introduced into cells, either in vivo or in vitro. This approach provides a direct functional readout for regulatory activity rather than computational predictions, allowing researchers to identify promoters, enhancers, and other regulatory elements with validated cell-type specificity. SuRE™ can be applied to a wide range of organisms and has been used to functionally annotate and design regulatory sequences for applications in gene therapy, cell therapy, drug discovery, and agricultural biotechnology.
Variational synthesis is a breakthrough technology developed by JURA Bio that enables the design and physical manufacturing of quadrillions of novel biological sequences by training generative models that are aware of the constraints and possibilities of DNA synthesis chemistry. This approach allows every molecule of DNA to represent a fresh sample from the generative model, producing libraries with unprecedented diversity and quality for applications spanning antibodies, T cell receptors, and now regulatory DNA elements.
Founded in 2017, Annogen is a leader in tailored gene expression engineering, focused on making advanced therapies safer and more effective. Through our proprietary SuRE™ platform, we characterize millions of cis-regulatory sequences both in vivo and in vitro, enabling the development of novel, patentable promoters and gain-of-function gene-editing strategies. We offer off-the-shelf promoters that are extensively validated—including in clinical-stage therapies—as well as bespoke gene expression engineering programs tailored to specific applications. Together, these capabilities support innovation across cell and gene therapy, biopharmaceutical manufacturing, and agricultural trait development.
For more information, visit www.annogen.bio.
JURA Bio is pioneering AI-native drug discovery by bridging the gap between computational design and physical reality in biological AI. Founded in 2017 and headquartered in Boston with additional operations in Basel, Oslo, and Copenhagen, JURA Bio has developed an end-to-end platform that integrates machine learning, synthetic biology, and high-throughput experimentation to create a new paradigm in drug discovery where AI learns from tens of billions of real protein interactions. For more information, visit www.jurabio.com.
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