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…
27 July 2026
Annogen’s AIM™ screen revolutionizes the level of control researchers have over transgene expression by identifying optimal genomic loci for transgene integration. Choosing the integration site with the right expression profile will enable safer and more effective cell and gene therapies.
The power of cell therapies relies on stable and controlled expression of therapeutic genes within the engineered cells. Transgenes in these therapies are often integrated with lentivirus or transposases, because these systems are very efficient. However, such random integrations may also result in clonal expansion, oncogenic transformation, variegated transgene expression and transcriptional silencing. Therefore, targeted integration into a predefined locus is an attractive alternative to random integration and is increasingly used in cell therapies. However, the number of known loci that facilitate safe and correct gene expression (e.g. AAVS1 and TRAC), also referred to a safe harbor loci, is limited.
The identification of novel integration sites often involves in silico predictions based on chromatin data, followed by laborious one-by-one targeted integrations to experimentally validate expression characteristics at those loci. AIM™ instead immediately starts with the experimental validation of expression characteristics for hundreds of thousands of potential sites in parallel. AIM™ can be applied to any organism and cell type.
Annogen’s AIM™ screen empowers researchers to overcome the limitations of currently known safe harbor loci by offering a powerful platform for:
Our team of experts is dedicated to supporting your research and development efforts, as we have done for numerous top biopharmaceutical companies before. We offer a range of services, including custom promoter identification and optimization, licensing opportunities for our proprietary promoters, as well as custom identification of favorable transgene integration sites.
