Circio presents circVec circular RNA in vivo expression proof-of-concept data at ESGCT 2024 annual meeting

• Circio selected to present its circVec circular RNA expression platform at the European Society of Cell and Gene Therapy (ESGCT) annual meeting in Rome 22-25 October; a prestigious and widely attended international gene therapy conference
• Circio presented new circVec protein expression data showing statistically significant advantage vs. conventional mRNA-based vector expression both in vitro and in vivo
• The circVec 2.1 generation shows 15x increase in protein expression in vivo, and has the potential to substantially improve on the performance of current gold-standard gene therapy approaches

Oslo, Norway 24 October 2024 – Circio Holding ASA (OSE: CRNA), a biotechnology company developing next generation circular RNA vector technology for gene therapy, today announces the publication of new, strong and statistically significant circVec circular RNA in vivo expression proof-of-concept data, presented both in the form of a poster and oral presentation by CTO, Dr. Thomas B Hansen, at the European Society of Cell and Gene Therapy (ESGCT) annual meeting 2024.

“Circio continues to build momentum with the unique and powerful circVec platform. We selected the prestigious ESGCT meeting to present our latest results as it provided a great opportunity to showcase our technology to a broad life science industry and academic audience,” said Dr. Thomas B. Hansen, CTO of Circio. “circVec significantly outperforms mRNA-based expression both in vitro and in vivo and has the potential to offer substantial enhancement over current gold-standard gene therapy approaches.”

In the ESGCT presentation, Circio showed the evolution and improvements of the circVec platform from the initial circVec 1.0 design to the current generation 2.1. Long-term in vivo experiments have now demonstrated that circVec 2.1 robustly outperforms classical mRNA-based expression over time, offering enhanced durability that reaches up to 15-fold higher reporter signals in mouse models. Additionally, a machine-learning approach to codon optimization has generated a novel circVec 2.2 design, delivering a further 2-4-fold increase in protein yield.

Circio is currently testing the performance of circVec 2.1 and 2.2 in both viral and DNA vector systems in multiple tissues and disease settings in vivo. These data will guide future development and partnering strategy for the circVec platform.

The ESGCT slides and poster are attached hereto, and will also be made available on www.circio.com 

Title of presentation and poster:

Optimization of in vitro and in vivo performance of circVec, a vector-based circular RNA expression platform for enhanced gene therapy

Presenter: Dr. Thomas B Hansen, CTO