Einbeck, Germany; Amsterdam, The Netherlands
December 5, 2024
KWS SAAT SE & Co. KGaA and Annogen B.V. today announced a partnership in which Annogen will use its FACE™ platform to functionally annotate non-coding variants that are of interest to KWS.
FACE™ is an adaptation of Annogen’s SuRE™ screen that allows for the swift testing of non-coding variants in plant protoplasts to help identify potential gain-of-function and loss-of-function genome variants.
Promoter design is becoming central to durable cell and gene therapy, as the field moves beyond delivery and toward precise expression control. Standard promoters like CMV or PGK often fail to solve key clinical challenges: off-target activity, “always-on” expression that can drive cellular exhaustion, and epigenetic silencing that shuts therapies down in vivo. Annogen’s SuRE™ platform addresses these bottlenecks by experimentally screening millions of non-coding DNA fragments in relevant models and refining designs with machine learning. The result is not a generic promoter, but a validated, non-viral promoter tailored for the specific tissue, condition, and therapeutic context.
The first patient dosing in VectorY Therapeutics’ PIONEER-ALS trial marks a definitive shift in gene therapy, moving past the “conservative” reliance on blunt viral promoters and the “digital guesses” of AI. While many rely on algorithms built from incomplete and insensitive data, VTx-002 is powered by an Annogen genome-derived promoter discovered through rigorous, large-scale experimental validation. This milestone proves that true therapeutic precision isn’t predicted in a black box—it is found by interrogating the genome directly to deliver the biological truth required for the clinic.
